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ESlisUSg 



THE 



PLEASURES OF ENGLAND. 



lectures Qibtn in @xfcrrtr + 

// ' 

JOI^N RUSKIN, D.C.L, LL.D., 

HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH, AND HONORARY FELLOW OF 
CORPUS-CHRISTI COLLEGE, 



DURING HIS 



SECOND TENURE OF THE SLADE PROFESSORSHIP. 



NEW YORK: 

JOHN WILEY AND SONS. 

1885. 



Hftwo 



ELECTROTYFED AND PRINTED 

BY RAND, AVERY, AND COMPANY, 

BOSTON, MASS. 



TRANBPaS 
©, O, PUBLIC LIBRAS? 



CONTENTS. 



LECTURE I. 

PAGE 

The Pleasures of Learning. Bertha to Osbnrga .... 5 

LECTURE II. 
The Pleasures of Faith. Alfred to the Confessvr .... 31 

LECTURK III. 
The Pleasures of Deed. Alfred to Cceur de Lion ... 61 

LECTURE IV. 
The Pleasures of Fancy. Cceur de Lion to Elizabeth . . 91 



LECTURE I. 



THE PLEASURES OF LEARNING. 

'Bertha to Osburga. 



LECTURE I. 
THE PLEASURES OF LEARNING. 



BERTHA TO OSBURGA. 

IN the short review of the present state of English 
Art, given you last year, I left necessarily many 
points untouched, and others unexplained. The sev- 
enth lecture, which I did not think it necessary to read 
aloud, furnished you with some of the corrective state- 
ments of which, whether spoken or not, it was 
extremely desirable that you should estimate the bal- 
ancing weight. These I propose in the present course 
farther to illustrate, and to arrive with you at, I hope, 
a just — you would not wish it to be a flattering — 
estimate of the conditions of our English artistic life, 
past and present, in order that with due allowance for 
them we may determine, with some security, what 
those of us who have faculty ought to do, and those 
who have sensibility, to admire. 

2. In thus rightly doing and feeling, you will find 
summed a wider duty, and granted a greater power, 



8 The Pleasures of Learning. 

than the moral philosophy at this moment current with 
you has ever conceived ; and a prospect opened to you 
besides, of such a Future for England as you may both 
hopefully and proudly labour for with your hands, and 
those of you who are spared to the ordinary term of 
human life, even see with your eyes, when all this 
tumult of vain avarice and idle pleasure, into which you 
have been plunged at birth, shall have passed into its 
appointed perdition. 

3. I wish that you would read for introduction to the 
lectures I have this year arranged for you, that on the 
Future of England, which I gave to the cadets at 
Woolwich in the first year of my Professorship here, 
1869; and which is now placed as the main conclusion 
of the "Crown of Wild Olive": and with it, very 
attentively, the close of my inaugural lecture given 
here ; for the matter, no less than the tenor of which, 
I was reproved by all my friends, as irrelevant and ill- 
judged; — which, nevertheless, is of all the pieces of 
teaching I have ever given from this chair, the most 
pregnant and essential to whatever studies, whether of 
Art or Science, you may pursue, in this place or else- 
where, during your lives. 

The opening words of that passage I will take leave 
to read to you again, — for they must still be the 
ground of whatever help I can give you, worth your 
acceptance. 

"There is a destiny now possible to us — the highest 



Bertha io Osburga. 9 

ever set before a nation to be accepted or refused. We 
are still undegenerate in race : a race mingled of the 
best northern blood. We are not yet dissolute in tem- 
per, but still have the firmness to govern, and the grace 
to obey. We have been taught a religion of pure 
mercy, which we must either now finally betray, or 
learn to defend by fulfilling. And we are rich in an 
inheritance of honour, bequeathed to us through a 
thousand years of noble history, which it should be our 
daily thirst to increase with splendid avarice ; so that 
Englishmen, if it be a sin to covet honour, should be 
the most offending souls alive. Within the last few 
years we have had the laws of natural science opened 
to us with a rapidity which has been blinding by its 
brightness ; and means of transit and communication 
given to us, which have made but one kingdom of the 
habitable globe. 

"One kingdom; — but who is to be its king? Is 
there to be no king in it, think you, and every man to 
do that which is right in his own eyes ? Or only kings 
of terror, and the obscene empires of Mammon and 
Belial ? Or will you, youths of England, make your 
country again a royal throne of kings ; a sceptred isle ; 
for all the world a source of light, a centre of peace ; 
mistress of Learning and of the Arts ; — faithful guard- 
ian of great memories in the midst of irreverent and 
ephemeral visions — faithful servant of time-tried prin- 
ciples, under temptation from fond experiments and 



io The Pleaswes of Learning. 

licentious desires ; and amidst the cruel and clamorous 
jealousies of the nations, worshipped in her strange 
valour, of goodwill towards men?" 

The fifteen years that have passed since I spoke 
these words must, I think, have convinced some of my 
immediate hearers that the need for such an appeal 
was more pressing than they then imagined; — while 
they have also more and more convinced me myself 
that the ground I took for it was secure, and that the 
youths and girls now entering on the duties of active 
life are able to accept and fulfil the hope I then held 
out to them. 

In which assurance I ask them to-day to begin the 
examination with me, very earnestly, of the question 
laid before you in that seventh of my last year's lec- 
tures, whether London, as it is now, be indeed the 
natural, and therefore the heaven-appointed outgrowth 
of the inhabitation, these 1800 years, of the valley of 
the Thames by a progressively instructed and disci- 
plined people ; or if not, in what measure and manner 
the aspect and spirit of the great city may be possibly 
altered by your acts and thoughts. 

In my introduction to the Economist of Xenophon I 
said that every fairly educated European boy or girl 
ought to learn the history of five cities, — Athens, 
Rome, Venice, Florence, and London ; that of London 
including, or at least compelling in parallel study, some 
knowledge also of the history of Paris. 



Bertha to Osburga. 1 1 

A few words are enough to explain the reasons for 
this choice. The history of Athens, rightly told, in- 
cludes all that need be known of Greek religion and 
arts ; that of Rome, the victory of Christianity over 
Paganism ; those of Venice and Florence sum the 
essential facts respecting the Christian arts of Paint- 
ing, Sculpture, and Music ; and that of London, in her 
sisterhood with Paris, the development of Christian 
Chivalry and Philosophy, with their exponent art of 
Gothic architecture. 

Without the presumption of forming a distinct de- 
sign, I yet hoped at the time when this division of 
study was suggested, with the help of my pupils, to 
give the outlines of their several histories during my 
work in Oxford. Variously disappointed and arrested, 
alike by difficulties of investigation and failure of 
strength, I may yet hope to lay down for you, begin- 
ning with your own metropolis, some of the lines of 
thought in following out which such a task might be 
most effectively accomplished. 

You observe that I speak of architecture as the chief 
exponent of the feelings both of the French and Eng- 
lish races. Together with it, however, most important 
evidence of character is given by the illumination of 
manuscripts, and by some forms of jewellery and met- 
allurgy : and my purpose in this course of lectures is 
to illustrate by all these arts the phases of national 
character which it is impossible that historians should 



1 2 The Pleasures of Learning. 

estimate, or even observe, with accuracy, unless they 
are cognizant of excellence in the aforesaid modes of 
structural and ornamental craftsmanship. 

In one respect, as indicated by the title chosen for 
this course, I have varied the treatment of their subject 
from that adopted in all my former books. Hitherto, I 
have always endeavoured to illustrate the personal 
temper and skill of the artist ; holding the wishes or 
taste of his spectators at small account, and saying of 
Turner you ought to like him, and of Salvator, you 
ought not, etc., etc., without in the least considering 
what the genius or instinct of the spectator might other- 
wise demand, or approve. But in the now attempted 
sketch of Christian history, I have approached every 
question from the people's side, and examined the na- 
ture, not of the special faculties by which the work 
was produced, but of the general instinct by which it 
was asked for, and enjoyed. Therefore I thought the 
proper heading for these papers should represent them 
as descriptive of the Pleasures of England, rather than 
of its Arts. 

And of these pleasures, necessarily, the leading one 
was that of Learning, in the sense of receiving instruc- 
tion ; — a pleasure totally separate from that of finding 
out things for yourself, — and an extremely sweet and 
sacred pleasure, when you know how to seek it, and 
receive. 

On which I am the more disposed, and even com- 



Bertha to Osbtirga. 13 

pelled, here to insist, because your modern ideas of 
Development imply that you must all turn out what 
you are to be, and find out what you are to know, for 
yourselves, by the inevitable operation of your anterior 
affinities and inner consciences: — whereas the old idea 
of education was that the baby material of you, how- 
ever accidentally or inevitably born, was at least to be 
by external force, and ancestral knowledge, bred ; and 
treated by its Fathers and Tutors as a plastic vase, to 
be shaped or mannered as they chose, not as it chose, 
and filled, when its form was well finished and baked, 
with sweetness of sound doctrine, as with Hybla honey, 
or Arabian spikenard. 

Without debating how far these two modes of acquir- 
ing knowledge — finding out, and being told — may 
severally be good, and in perfect instruction combined, 
I have to point out to you that, broadly, Athens, Rome, 
and Florence are self-taught, and internally developed ; 
while all the Gothic races, without any exception, but 
especially those of London and Paris, are afterwards 
taught by these ; and had, therefore, when they chose 
to accept it, the delight of being instructed, without 
trouble or doubt, as fast as they could read or imitate ; 
and brought forward to the point where their own 
northern instincts might wholesomely superimpose or 
graft some national ideas upon these sound instruc- 
tions. Read over what I said on this subject in the 
third of my lectures last year (page 79), and simplify 



14 The Pleasures of Learning. 

that already brief statement further, by fastening in 
your mind Carlyle's general symbol of the best attain- 
ments of northern religious sculpture, — "three whale- 
cubs combined by boiling," and reflecting that the 
mental history of all northern European art is the 
modification of that graceful type, under the orders of 
the Athena of Homer and Phidias. 

And this being quite indisputably the broad fact of 
the matter, I greatly marvel that your historians never, 
so far as I have read, think of proposing to you the 
question — what you might have made of yourselves 
without the help of Homer and Phidias : what sort of 
beings the Saxon and the Celt, the Frank and the 
Dane, might have been by this time, untouched by the 
spear of Pallas, unruled by the rod of Agricola, and 
sincerely the native growth, pure of root, and ungrafted 
in fruit of the clay of Isis, rock of Dovrefeldt, and 
sands of Elbe ? Think of it, and think chiefly what 
form the ideas, and images, of your natural religion 
might probably have taken, if no Roman missionary 
had ever passed the Alps in charity, and no English 
king in pilgrimage. 

I have been of late indebted more than I can express 
to the friend who has honoured me by the dedication 
of his recently published lectures on ' Older England ; ' 
and whose eager enthusiasm and far collected learning 
have enabled me for the first time to assign their just 
meaning and value to the ritual and imagery of Saxon 



Bertha to Osburga. 15 

devotion. But while every page of Mr. Hodgett's 
book, and, I may gratefully say also, every sentence of 
his teaching, has increased and justified the respect in 
which I have always been by my own feeling disposed 
to hold the mythologies founded on the love and knowl- 
edge of the natural world, I have also been led by 
them to conceive, far more forcibly than hitherto, the 
power which the story of Christianity possessed, first 
heard through the wreaths of that cloudy superstition, 
in the substitution, for its vaporescent allegory, of a 
positive and literal account of a real Creation, and an 
instantly present, omnipresent, and compassionate God. 

Observe, there is no question whatever in examining 
this influence, how far Christianity itself is true, or the 
transcendental doctrines of it intelligible. Those who 
brought you the story of it believed it with all their 
souls to be true, — and the effect of it on the hearts of 
your ancestors was that of an unquestionable, infinitely 
lucid message straight from God, doing away with all 
difficulties, grief, and fears for those who willingly 
received it, nor by any, except wilfully and obstinately 
vile persons, to be, by any possibility, denied or 
refused. 

And it was precisely, observe, the vivacity and joy 
with which the main fact of Christ's life was accepted 
which gave the force and wrath to the controversies 
instantly arising about its nature. 

Those controversies vexed and shook, but never un- 



1 6 The Pleasures of Learning. 

dermined, the faith they strove to purify, and the mirac- 
ulous presence, errorless precept, and loving promises 
of their Lord were alike undoubted, alike rejoiced in, 
by every nation that heard the word of Apostles. The 
Pelagian's assertion that immortality could be won by 
man's will, and the Arian's that Christ possessed no 
more than man's nature, never for an instant — or in 
any country — hindered the advance of the moral law 
and intellectual hope of Christianity. Far the con- 
trary ; the British heresy concerning Free Will, though 
it brought bishop after bishop into England to extin- 
guish it, remained an extremely healthy and active 
element in the British mind down to the days of John 
Bunyan and the guide Great Heart, and the calmly 
Christian justice and simple human virtue of Theodoric 
were the very roots and first burgeons of the regenera- 
tion of Italy.* But of the degrees in which it was 
possible for any barbarous nation to receive during the 
first five centuries, either the spiritual power of Chris- 
tianity itself, or the instruction in classic art and 
science which accompanied it, you cannot rightly judge, 
without taking the pains, and they will not, I think, be 

* Gibbon, in his 37th chapter, makes Ulphilas also an Arian, but might have 
forborne, with grace, his own definition of orthodoxy : — and you are to observe 
generally that at this time the teachers who admitted the inferiority of Christ to 
the Father as touching his Manhood, were often counted among Arians, but 
quite falsely. Christ's own words, " My Father is greater than I," end that 
controversy at once. Arianism consists not in asserting the subjection of the 
Son to the Father, but in denying the subjected Divinity. 



Bertha to Osburga. 17 

irksome, of noticing carefully, and fixing permanently in 
your minds, the separating characteristics of the greater 
races, both in those who learned and those who taught. 

Of the Huns and Vandals we need not speak. They 
are merely forms of Punishment and Destruction. Put 
them out of your minds altogether, and remember only 
the names of the immortal nations, which abide on 
their native rocks, and plough their unconquered plains, 
at this hour. 

Briefly, in the north, — Briton, Norman, Frank, Sax- 
on, Ostrogoth, Lombard; briefly, in the south, — Tus- 
can, Roman, Greek, Syrian, Egyptian, Arabian. 

Now of these races, the British (I avoid the word 
Celtic, because you would expect me to say Keltic ; and 
I don't mean to, lest you should be wanting me next to 
call the patroness of music St. Kekilia), the British, 
including Breton, Cornish, Welsh, Irish, Scot, and Pict, 
are, I believe, of all the northern races, the one which 
has deepest love of external nature ; — and the richest 
inherent gift of pure music and song, as such ; sepa- 
rated from the intellectual gift which raises song into 
poetry. They are naturally also religious, and for some 
centuries after their own conversion are one of the 
chief evangelizing powers in Christendom. But they 
are neither apprehensive nor receptive ; — they cannot 
understand the classic races, and learn scarcely any- 
thing from them ; perhaps better so, if the classic races 
had been more careful to understand them. 



1 8 The Pleasures of Learning. 

Next, the Norman is scarcely more apprehensive 
than the Celt, but he is more constructive, and uses to 
good advantage what he learns from the Frank. His 
main characteristic is an energy, which never exhausts 
itself in vain anger, desire, or sorrow, but abides and 
rules, like a living rock : — where he wanders, he flows 
like lava, and congeals like granite. 

Next, I take in this first sketch the Saxon and Frank 
together, both pre-eminently apprehensive, both docile 
exceedingly, imaginative in the highest, but in life 
active more than pensive, eager in desire, swift of 
invention, keenly sensitive to animal beauty, but with 
difficulty rational, and rarely, for the future, wise. 
Under the conclusive name of Ostrogoth, you may 
class whatever tribes are native to Central Germany, 
and develope themselves, as time goes on, into that 
power of the German Caesars which still asserts itself 
as an empire against the licence and insolence of mod- 
ern republicanism, — of which races, though this gen- 
eral name, no description can be given in rapid terms. 

And lastly, the Lombards, who, at the time we have 
to deal with, were sternly indocile, gloomily imagina- 
tive, — of almost Norman energy, and differing from 
all the other western nations chiefly in this notable 
particular, that while the Celt is capable of bright wit 
and happy play, and the Norman, Saxon, and Frank all 
alike delight in caricature, the Lombards, like the Ara- 
bians, never jest. 



Bertha to Osburga. 19 

These, briefly, are the six barbaric nations who are 
to be taught : and of whose native arts and faculties, 
before they receive any tutorship from the south, I find 
no well-sifted account in any history : — but thus much 
of them, collecting your own thoughts and knowledge, 
you may easily discern — they were all, with the excep- 
tion of the Scots, practical workers and builders in 
wood ; and those of them who had coasts, first rate 
sea-boat builders, with fine mathematical instincts and 
practice in that kind far developed, necessarily good 
sail-weaving, and sound fur-stitching, with stout iron- 
work of nail and rivet ; rich copper and some silver 
work in decoration — the Celts developing peculiar 
gifts in linear design, but wholly incapable of drawing 
animals or figures ; — the Saxons and Franks having 
enough capacity in that kind, but no thought of at- 
tempting it ; the Normans and Lombards still farther 
remote from any such skill. More and more, it seems 
to me wonderful that under your British block-temple, 
grimly extant on its pastoral plain, or beside the first 
crosses engraved on the rock at Whithorn — you Eng- 
lish and Scots do not oftener consider what you might 
or could have come to, left to yourselves. 

Next, let us form the list of your tutor nations, in 
whom it generally pleases you to look at nothing but 
the corruptions. If we could get into the habit of 
thinking more of our own corruptions and more of 
their virtues, we should have a better chance of learn- 



20 The Pleasures of Learning. 

ing the true laws alike of art and destiny. But, the 
safest way of all, is to assure ourselves that true knowl- 
edge of any thing or any creature is only of the good 
of it ; that its nature and life are in that, and that what 
is diseased, — that is to say, unnatural and mortal, — 
you must cut away from it in contemplation, as you 
would in surgery. 

Of the six tutor nations, two, the Tuscan and Arab, 
have no effect on early Christian England. But the 
Roman, Greek, Syrian, and Egyptian act together from 
the earliest times ; you are to study the influence of 
Rome upon England in Agricola, Constantius, St. Ben- 
edict, and St. Gregory; of Greece upon England in 
the artists of Byzantium and Ravenna; of Syria and 
Egypt upon England in St. Jerome, St. Augustine, St. 
Chrysostom, and St. Athanase. 

St. Jerome, in central Bethlehem; St. Augustine, 
Carthaginian by birth, in truth a converted Tyrian, 
Athanase, Egyptian, symmetric and fixed as an Egyp- 
tian aisle ; Chrysostom, golden mouth of all ; these are, 
indeed, every one teachers of all the western world, 
but St. Augustine especially of lay, as distinguished 
from monastic, Christianity to the Franks, and finally 
to us. His rule, expanded into the treatise of the City 
of God, is taken for guide of life and policy by Charle- 
magne, and becomes certainly the fountain of Evangel- 
ical Christianity, distinctively so called, (and broadly 
the lay Christianity of Europe, since, in the purest 



Bertha to Osburga. 21 

form of it, that is to say, the most merciful, charitable, 
variously applicable, kindly wise.) The greatest type 
of it, as far as I know, St. Martin of Tours, whose 
character is sketched, I think in the main rightly, in 
the Bible of Amiens ; and you may bind together your 
thoughts of its course by remembering that Alcuin, 
born at York, dies in the Abbey of St. Martin, at 
Tours ; that as St. Augustine was in his writings 
Charlemagne's Evangelist in faith, Alcuin was, in 
living presence, his master in rhetoric, logic, and as- 
tronomy, with the other physical sciences. 

A hundred years later than St. Augustine, comes the 
rule of St. Benedict — the Monastic rule, virtually, of 
European Christianity, ever since — and theologically 
the Law of Works, as distinguished from the Law of 
Faith. St. Augustine and all the disciples of St. 
Augustine tell Christians what they should feel and 
think : St. Benedict and all the disciples of St. Bene- 
dict tell Christians what they should say and do. 

In the briefest, but also the perfectest distinction, 
the disciples of St. Augustine are those who open the 
door to Christ — "If any man hear my voice"; but 
the Benedictines those to whom Christ opens the door 
— "To him that knocketh it shall be opened." 

Now, note broadly the course and action of this rule, 
as it combines with the older one. St. Augustine's, 
accepted heartily by Clovis, and, with various degrees 
of understanding, by the kings and queens of the 



22 The Pleasures of Learning. 

Merovingian dynasty, makes seemingly little difference 
in their conduct, so that their profession of it remains 
a scandal to Christianity to this day ; and yet it lives, 
in the true hearts among them, down from St. Clotilde 
to her great grand-daughter Bertha, who in becoming 
Queen of Kent, builds under its chalk downs her own 
little chapel to St. Martin, and is the first effectively 
and permanently useful missionary to the Saxons, the 
beginner of English Erudition, — the first laid corner 
stone of beautiful English character. 

I think henceforward you will find the memorandum 
of dates which I have here set down for my own guid- 
ance more simply useful than those confused by record 
of unimportant persons and inconsequent events, which 
form the indices of common history. 

From the year of the Saxon invasion 449, there are 
exactly 400 years to the birth of Alfred, 849. You 
have no difficulty in remembering those cardinal years. 
Then, you have Four great men and great events to' 
remember, at the close of the fifth century. Clovis, 
and the founding of Frank Kingdom ; Theodoric and 
the founding of the Gothic Kingdom ; Justinian and 
the founding of Civil law; St. Benedict and the found- 
ing of Religious law. 

Of Justinian, and his work, I am not able myself to 
form any opinion — and it is, I think, unnecessary for 
students of history to form any, until they are able to 
estimate clearly the benefits, and mischief, of the civil 



Bertha to Osbtcrga. 23 

law of Europe in its present state. But to Clovis, 
Theodoric, and St. Benedict, without any question, we 
owe more than any English historian has yet ascribed, 
— and they are easily held in mind together, for Clovis 
ascended the Frank throne in the year of St. Benedict's 
birth, 481. Theodoric fought the battle of Verona, 
and founded the Ostrogothic Kingdom in Italy twelve 
years later, in 493, and thereupon married the sister of 
Clovis. That marriage is always passed in a casual 
sentence, as if a merely political one, and while page 
after page is spent in following the alternations of furi- 
ous crime and fatal chance, in the contests between 
Fredegonde and Brunehaut, no historian ever considers 
whether the great Ostrogoth who wore in the battle of 
Verona the dress which his mother had woven for him, 
was likely to have chosen a wife without love! — or 
how far the perfectness, justice, and temperate wisdom 
of every ordinance of his reign was owing to the sym- 
pathy and counsel of his Frankish queen. 

You have to recollect, then, thus far, only three 
cardinal dates : — 

449. Saxon invasion. 

481. Clovis reigns and St. Benedict is born. 

493. Theodoric conquers at Verona. 

Then, roughly, a hundred years later, in 590, Ethel- 
bert, the fifth from Hengist, and Bertha, the third from 
Clotilde, are king and queen of Kent. I cannot find 
the date of their marriage, but the date, 590, which 



24 The Pleasures of Learning. 

you must recollect for cardinal, is that of Gregory's 
accession to the pontificate, and I believe Bertha was 
then in middle life, having persevered in her religion 
firmly, but inoffensively, and made herself beloved by 
her husband and people. She, in England, Theodo- 
linda in Lombardy, and St. Gregory in Rome : — in 
their hands, virtually lay the destiny of Europe. 

Then the period from Bertha to Osburga, 590 to 
849 — say 250 years — is passed by the Saxon people 
in the daily more reverent learning of the Christian 
faith, and daily more peaceful and skilful practice of 
the humane arts and duties which it invented and 
inculcated. 

The statement given by Sir Edward Creasy of the 
result of these 250 years of lesson is, with one cor- 
rection, the most simple and just that I can find. 

" A few years before the close of the sixth century, 
the country was little more than a wide battle-field, 
where gallant but rude warriors fought with each 
other, or against the neighbouring Welsh or Scots ; 
unheeding and unheeded by the rest of Europe, or, if 
they attracted casual attention, regarded with- dread 
and disgust as the fiercest of barbarians and the most 
untameable of pagans. In the eighth century, Eng- 
land was looked up to with admiration and gratitude, 
as superior to all the other countries of Western Eu- 
rope in piety and learning, and as the land whence 
the most zealous and successful saints and teachers 



Bertha to Osburga. 25 

came forth to convert and enlighten the still barbarous 
regions of the continent." 

This statement is broadly true ; yet the correction 
it needs is a very important one. England, — under 
her first Alfred of Northumberland, and under Ina of 
Wessex, is indeed during these centuries the most 
learned, thoughtful, and progressive of European states. 
But she is not a missionary power. The missionaries 
are always to her, not from her : — for the very reason 
that she is learning so eagerly, she does not take to 
preaching. Ina founds his Saxon school at Rome not 
to teach Rome, nor convert the Pope, but to drink at 
the source of knowledge, and to receive laws from 
direct and unquestioned authority. The missionary 
power was wholly Scotch and Irish, and that power 
was wholly one of zeal and faith, not of learning. I 
will ask you, in the course of my next lecture, to regard 
it attentively ; to-day, I must rapidly draw to the con- 
clusions I would leave with you. 

It is more and more wonderful to me as I think of 
it, that no effect whatever was produced on the Saxon, 
nor on any other healthy race of the North, either by 
the luxury of Rome, or by her art, whether construc- 
tive or imitative. The Saxon builds no aqueducts — 
designs no roads, rounds no theatres in imitation of 
her, — envies none of her vile pleasures, — admires, so 
far as I can judge, none of her far-carried realistic art. 
I suppose that it needs intelligence of a more advanced 



26 The Pleasures of Learning. 

kind to see the qualities of complete sculpture : and 
that we may think of the Northern intellect as still like 
that of a child, who cares to picture its own thoughts 
in its own way, but does not care for the thoughts of 
older people, or attempt to copy what it feels too diffi- 
cult. This much at least is certain, that for one cause 
or another, everything that now at Paris or London our 
painters most care for and try to realize, of ancient 
Rome, was utterly innocuous and unattractive to the 
Saxon : while his mind was frankly open to the direct 
teaching of Greece and to the methods of bright dec- 
oration employed in the Byzantine Empire : for these 
alone seemed to his fancy suggestive of the glories 
of the brighter world promised by Christianity. Jew- 
ellery, vessels of gold and silver, beautifully written 
books, and music, are the gifts of St. Gregory alike to 
the Saxon and Lombard ; all these beautiful things 
being used, not- for the pleasure of the present life, 
but as the symbols of another ; while the drawings in 
Saxon manuscripts, in which, better than in any other 
remains of their life, we can read the people's charac- 
ter, are rapid endeavours to express for themselves, 
and convey to others, some likeness of the realities of 
sacred event in which they had been instructed. They 
differ from every archaic school of former design in 
this evident correspondence with an imagined reality. 
All previous archaic art whatsoever is symbolic and 
decorative — not realistic. The contest of Herakles 



Bertha to Osburga. 27 

with the Hydra on a Greek vase is a mere sign that 
such a contest took place, not a picture of it, and in 
drawing that sign the potter is always thinking of the 
effect of the engraved lines on the curves of his pot, 
and taking care to keep out of the way of the handle ; 
— but a Saxon monk would scratch his idea of the Fall 
of the angels or the Temptation of Christ over a whole 
page of his manuscript in variously explanatory scenes, 
evidently full of inexpressible vision, and eager to 
explain and illustrate all that he felt or believed. 

Of the progress and arrest of these gifts, I shall 
have to speak in my next address ; but I must regret- 
fully conclude to-day with some brief warning against 
the complacency which might lead you to regard them 
as either at that time entirely original in the Saxon 
race, or at the present day as signally characteristic of 
it. That form of complacency is exhibited in its most 
amiable but, therefore, most deceptive guise, in the 
passage with which the late Dean of Westminster 
concluded his lecture at Canterbury in April, 1854, on 
the subject of the landing of Augustine. I will not 
spoil the emphasis of the passage by comment as I 
read, but must take leave afterwards to intimate some 
grounds for abatement in the fervour of its self-gratu- 
latory ecstasy. 

" Let any one sit on the hill of the little church of 
St. Martin, and look on the view which is there spread 
before his eyes. Immediately below are the towers 



28 The Pleasures of Learning. 

of the great abbey of St. Augustine, where Christian 
learning and civilization first struck root in the Anglo- 
Saxon race ; and within which now, after a lapse of 
many centuries, a new institution has arisen, intended to 
carry far and wide, to countries of which Gregory and 
Augustine never heard, the blessings which they gave 
to us. Carry your view on — and there rises high above 
all the magnificent pile of our cathedral, equal in splen- 
dour and state to any, the noblest temple or church 
that Augustine could have seen in ancient Rome, 
rising on the very ground which derives its consecra- 
tion from him. And still more than the grandeur of 
the outward buildings that rose from the little church 
of Augustine and the little palace of Ethelbert have 
been the institutions of all kinds of which these were 
the earliest cradle. From Canterbury, the first English 
Christian city, — from Kent, the first English Christian 
kingdom — has by degrees arisen the whole constitu- 
tion of Church and State in England which now binds 
together the whole British Empire. And from the 
Christianity here established in England has flowed, 
by direct consequence, first the Christianity of Ger- 
many ; then, after a long interval, of North America ; 
and lastly, we may trust, in time, of all India and all 
Australasia. The view from St. Martin's Church is 
indeed one of the most inspiriting that can be found 
in the world ; there is none to which I would more 
willingly take any one who doubted whether a small 



Bertha to Osfairga. 29 

beginning could lead to a great and lasting good ; — 
none which carries us more vividly back into the past, 
or more hopefully forward into the future." 

To this Gregorian canticle in praise of the British 
constitution, I grieve, but am compelled, to take these 
following historical objections. The first missionary 
to Germany was Ulphilas, and what she owes to these 
islands she owes to Iona, not to Thanet. Our mission- 
ary offices to America as to Africa, consist I believe 
principally in the stealing of land, and the extermina- 
tion of its proprietors by intoxication. Our rule in 
India has introduced there, Paisley instead of Cash- 
mere shawls : in Australasia our Christian aid supplies, 
I suppose, the pious farmer with convict labour. And 
although, when the Dean wrote the above passage, St. 
Augustine's and the cathedral were — I take it on trust 
from his description — the principal objects in the 
prospect from St. Martin's Hill, I believe even the 
cheerfullest of my audience would not now think 
the scene one of the most inspiriting in the world. 
For recent progress has entirely accommodated the 
architecture of the scene to the convenience of the 
missionary workers above enumerated ; to the peculiar 
necessities of the civilization they have achieved. For 
the sake of which the cathedral, the monastery, the 
temple, and the tomb, of Bertha, contract themselves 
in distant or despised subservience under the colossal 
walls of the county gaol. 



LECTURE II. 



THE PLEASURES OF FAITH. 
^Alfred to the Confessor. 



LECTURE II. 

THE PLEASURES OF FAITH. 



ALFRED TO THE CONFESSOR. 

I WAS forced in my last lecture to pass by alto- 
gether, and to-day can only with momentary defini- 
tion notice, the part taken by Scottish missionaries in 
the Christianizing of England and Burgundy. I would 
pray you therefore, in order to fill the gap which I 
think it better to leave distinctly, than close confusedly, 
to read the histories of St. Patrick, St. Columba, and 
St. Columban, as they are given you by Montalembert 
in his 'Moines d'Occident.' You will find in his pages 
all the essential facts that are known, encircled with 
a nimbus of enthusiastic sympathy which I hope you 
will like better to see them through, than distorted by 
blackening fog of contemptuous rationalism. But al- 
though I ask you thus to make yourselves aware of the 
greatness of my omission, I must also certify you that 
it does not break the unity of our own immediate 
subject. The influence of Celtic passion and art both 

33 



34 The Pleasures of Faith. 

on Northumbria and the Continent, beneficent in all 
respects while it lasted, expired without any permanent 
share in the work or emotion of the Saxon and Frank. 
The book of Kells, and the bell of St. Patrick, repre- 
sent sufficiently the peculiar character of Celtic design ; 
and long since, in the first lecture of the ' Two Paths,' 
I explained both the modes of skill, and points of 
weakness, which rendered such design unprogressive. 
Perfect in its peculiar manner, and exulting in the 
faultless practice of a narrow skill, it remained cen- 
tury after century incapable alike of inner growth, or 
foreign instruction ; inimitable, yet incorrigible ; mar- 
vellous, yet despicable, to its death. Despicable, I 
mean, only in the limitation of its capacity, not in its 
quality or nature. If you make a Christian of a lamb 
or a squirrel — what can you expect of the lamb 
but jumping — what of the squirrel, but pretty spirals, 
traced with his tail? He won't steal your nuts any 
more, and he'll say his prayers like this — *.; but you 
cannot make a Beatrice's griffin, and emblem of all the 
Catholic Church, out of him. 

You will have observed, also, that the plan of these 
lectures does not include any reference to the Roman 
Period in England; of which you will find jail I think 
necessary to say, in the part called Valle Cruris of 
' Our Fathers have told us.' But I must here warn 
you, with reference to it, of one gravely false prejudice 

* Making a sign. 



Alfred to the Confessor. 35 

of Montalembert. He is entirely blind to the condi- 
tions of Roman virtue, which existed in the midst of 
the corruptions of the Empire, forming the characters 
of such Emperors as Pertinax, Carus, Probus, the sec- 
ond Claudius, Aurelian, and our own Constantius ; and 
he denies, with abusive violence, the power for good, 
of Roman Law, over the Gauls and Britons. 

Respecting Roman national character, I will simply 
beg you to remember, that both St. Benedict and St. 
Gregory are Roman patricians, before they are either 
monk or pope ; respecting its influence on Britain, I 
think you may rest content with Shakespeare's esti- 
mate of it. Both Lear and Cymbeline belong to this 
time, so difficult to our apprehension, when the Briton 
accepted both Roman laws and Roman gods. There 
is indeed the born Kentish gentleman's protest against 
them in Kent's — 

" Now, by Apollo, king, 
Thou swear'st thy gods in vain " ; 

but both Cordelia and Imogen are just as thoroughly 
Roman ladies, as Virgilia or Calphurnia. 

Of British Christianity and the Arthurian Legends, 
I shall have a word or two to say in my lecture on 
" Fancy," in connection with the similar romance 
which surrounds Theodoric and Charlemagne : only 
the worst of it is, that while both Dietrich and Karl 
are themselves more wonderful than the legends of 



36 The Pleasures of Faith. 

them, Arthur fades into intangible vision: — this much, 
however, remains to this day, of Arthurian blood in 
us, that the richest fighting element in the British 
army and navy is British native, — that is to say, High- 
lander, Irish, Welsh, and Cornish. 

Content, therefore, (means being now given you for 
filling gaps,) with the estimates given you in the pre- 
ceding lecture of the sources of instruction possessed 
by the Saxon capital, I pursue to-day our question 
originally proposed, what London might have been by 
this time, if the nature of the flowers, trees, and chil- 
dren, born at the Thames-side, had been rightly under- 
stood and cultivated. 

Many of my hearers can imagine far better than I, 
the look that London must have had in Alfred's and 
Canute's days.* I have not, indeed, the least idea my- 
self what its buildings were like, but certainly the 
groups of its shipping must have been superb"; small, 

* Here Alfred's Silver Penny was shown and commented on, thus : — Of 
what London was like in the days of faith, I can show you one piece of artistic 
evidence. It is Alfred's silver penny struck in London mint. The character 
of a coinage is quite conclusive evidence in national history, and there is no 
great empire in progress, but tells its story in beautiful coins. Here in Alfred's 
penny, a round coin with L.6.N. D.I.N. I.A. struck on it, you have just the same 
beauty of design, the same enigmatical arrangement of letters, as in the early 
inscription, which it is "the pride of my life" to have discovered at Venice. 
This inscription (" the first words that Venice ever speaks aloud ") is, it will be 
remembered, on the Church of St. Giacomo di Rialto, and runs, being inter- 
preted — "Around this temple, let the merchant's law be just, his weights true, 
and his covenants faithful." 



Alfred to the Confessor. 37 

but entirely seaworthy vessels, manned by the best 
seamen in the then world. Of course, now, at Chat- 
ham and Portsmouth we have our ironclads, — extreme- 
ly beautiful and beautifully manageable things, no 
doubt — to set against this Saxon and Danish shipping; 
but the Saxon war-ships lay here at London shore — 
bright with banner and shield and dragon prow, — 
instead of these you may be happier, but are not 
handsomer, in having, now, the coal-barge, the penny 
steamer, and the wherry full of shop boys and girls. 
I dwell however for a moment only on the naval aspect 
of the tidal waters in the days of Alfred, because I can 
refer you for all detail on this part of our subject to 
the wonderful opening chapter of Dean Stanley's His- 
tory of Westminster Abbey, where you will find the 
origin of the name of London given as " The City of 
Ships." He does not, however, tell you, that there 
were built, then and there, the biggest war-ships in the 
world. I have often said to friends who praised my 
own books that I would rather have written that chap- 
ter than any one of them ; yet if I had been able to 
write the historical part of it, the conclusions drawn 
would have been extremely different. The Dean in- 
deed describes with a poet's joy the River of wells, 
which rose from those "once consecrated springs which 
now lie choked in Holywell and Clerkcnwell, and the 
rivulet of Ulebrig which crossed the Strand under the 
Ivy bridge " ; but it is only in the spirit of a modern 



38 The Pleasures of Faith. 

citizen of Belgravia that he exults in the fact that 
"the great arteries of our crowded streets, the vast 
sewers which cleanse our habitations, are fed by the 
life-blood of those old and living streams ; that under- 
neath our tread the Tyburn, and the Holborn, and the 
Fleet, and the Wall Brook, are still pursuing their 
ceaseless course, still ministering to the good of man, 
though in a far different fashion than when Druids 
drank of their sacred springs, and Saxons were bap- 
tized in their rushing waters, ages ago." 

Whatever sympathy you may feel with these elo- 
quent expressions of that entire complacency in the 
present, past, and future, which peculiarly animates 
Dean Stanley's writings, I must, in this case, pray you 
to observe that the transmutation of holy wells into 
sewers has, at least, destroyed the charm and utility 
of the Thames as a salmon stream, and I must ask you 
to read with attention the succeeding portions of the 
chapter which record the legends of the river fisheries 
in their relation to the first Abbey of Westminster ; 
dedicated by its builders to St. Peter, not merely in his 
office of cornerstone of the Church, nor even figura- 
tively as a fisher of men, but directly as a fisher of 
fish : — and which maintained themselves, you will see, 
in actual ceremony down to 1382, when a fisherman 
still annually took his place beside the Prior, after 
having brought in a salmon for St. Peter, which was 
carried in state down the middle of the refectory. 



Alfred to the Confessor. 39 

But as I refer to this page for the exact word, my 
eye is caught by one of the sentences of Londonian * 
thought which constantly pervert the well-meant books 
of pious England. " We see also," says the Dean, 
" the union of innocent fiction with worldly craft, which 
marks so many of the legends both of Pagan and 
Christian times." I might simply reply to this insin- 
uation that times which have no legends differ from 
the legendary ones merely by uniting guilty, instead 
of innocent, fiction, with worldly craft ; but I must 
farther advise you that the legends of these passion- 
ate times are in no wise, and in no sense, fiction at 
all ; but the true record of impressions made on the 
minds of persons in a state of eager spiritual excite- 
ment, brought into bright focus by acting steadily and 
frankly under its impulses. I could tell you a great 
deal more about such things than you would believe, 
and therefore, a great deal more than it would do you 
the least good to hear ; — but this much any who care 
to use their common sense modestly, cannot but admit, 
that unless they choose to try the rough life of the 
Christian ages, they cannot understand its practical 
consequences. You have all been taught by Lord 
Macaulay and his school that because you have Carpets 
instead of rushes for your feet ; and Feather-beds in- 
stead of fern for your backs ; and Kickshaws instead of 
beef for your eating ; and Drains instead of Holy Wells 

* Not Londinian. 



40 The Pleasures of Faith. 

for your drinking; — that, therefore, you are the Cream 
of Creation, and every one of you a seven-headed 
Solomon. Stay in those pleasant circumstances and 
convictions if you please ; but don't accuse your 
roughly bred and fed fathers of telling lies about 
the aspect the earth and sky bore to them, — till you 
have trodden the earth as they, barefoot, and seen the 
heavens as they, face to face. If you care to see and 
to know for yourselves, you may do it with little pains ; 
you need not do any great thing, you needn't keep one 
eye open and the other shut for ten years over a micro- 
scope, nor fight your way through icebergs and dark- 
ness to knowledge of the celestial pole. Simply, do as 
much as king after king of the Saxons did, — put rough 
shoes on your feet and a rough cloak on your shoul- 
ders, and walk to Rome and back. Sleep by the 
roadside, when it is fine, — in the first outhouse you 
can find, when it is wet ; and live on bread and water, 
with an onion or two, all the way ; and if the experi- 
ences which you will have to relate on your return do 
not, as may well be, deserve the name of spiritual ; at 
all events you will not be disposed to let other people 
regard them either as Poetry or Fiction. 

With this warning, presently to be at greater length 
insisted on, I trace for you, in Dean Stanley's words, 
which cannot be bettered except in the collection of 
their more earnest passages from among his interludes 
of graceful but dangerous qualification, — I trace, with 



Alfred to the Confessor. 41 

only such omission, the story he has told us of the 
foundation of that Abbey, which, he tells you, was the 
Mother of London, and has ever been the shrine and 
the throne of English faith and truth. 

"The gradual formation of a monastic body, indi- 
cated in the charters of Offa and Edgar, marks the 
spread of the Benedictine order throughout England, 
under the influence of Dunstan. The 'terror' of the 
spot, which had still been its chief characteristic in 
the charter of the wild Offa, had, in the days of the 
more peaceful Edgar, given way to a dubious 'renown.' 
Twelve monks is the number traditionally said to have 
been established by Dunstan. A few acres further up 
the river formed their chief property, and their monas- 
tic character was sufficiently recognized to have given 
to the old locality of the 'terrible place' the name of 
the 'Western Monastery,' or 'Minster of the West.' " 

The Benedictines then — twelve Benedictine monks 
— thus begin the building of existent Christian Lon- 
don. You know I told you the Benedictines are the 
Doing people, as the disciples of St. Augustine the 
Sentimental people. The Benedictines find no terror 
in their own thoughts — face the terror of places — 
change it into beauty of places, — make this terrible 
place, a Motherly Place — Mother of London. 

This first Westminster, however, the Dean goes on 
to say, " seems to have been overrun by the Danes, 
and it would have had no further history but for the 



42 The Pleasures of Faith. 

combination of circumstances which directed hither the 
notice of Edward the Confessor. 

I haven't time to read you all the combination of cir- 
cumstances. The last clinching circumstance was this — 

" There was in the neighbourhood of Worcester, ' far 
from men in the wilderness, on the slope of a wood, in 
a cave deep down in the grey rock,' a holy hermit ' of 
great age, living on fruits and roots.' One night when, 
after reading in the Scriptures ' how hard are the pains 
of hell, and how the enduring life of Heaven is sweet 
and to be desired,' he could neither sleep nor repose, 
St. Peter appeared to him, 'bright and beautiful, like 
to a clerk,' and warned him to tell the King that he 
was released from his vow ; that on that very day his 
messengers would return from Rome ; " (that is the 
combination of circumstances — bringing Pope's order 
to build a church to release the King from his vow of 
pilgrimage) ; " that ' at Thorney, two leagues from the 
city,' was the spot marked out where, in an ancient 
church, 'situated low,' he was to establish a perfect 
Benedictine monastery, which should be 'the gate of 
heaven, the ladder of prayer, whence those who serve 
St. Peter there, shall by him be admitted into Para- 
dise.' The hermit writes the account of the vision on 
parchment, seals it with wax, and brings it to the King, 
who compares it with the answer of the messengers, 
just arrived from Rome, and determines on carrying 
out the design as the Apostle had ordered. 



Alfred to tlie Confessor. 43 

"The ancient church, 'situated low,' indicated in this 
vision the one whose attached monastery had been 
destroyed by the Danes, but its little church remained, 
and was already dear to the Confessor, not only from 
the lovely tradition of its dedication by the spirit of 
St. Peter;" (you must read that for yourselves ;) "but 
also because of two miracles happening there to the 
King himself. 

" The first was the cure of a cripple, who sat in the 
road between the Palace and 'the Chapel of St. Peter,' 
which was 'near,' and who explained to the Chamber- 
lain Hugolin that, after six pilgrimages to Rome in 
vain, St. Peter had promised his cure if the King 
would, on his own royal neck, carry him to the Mon- 
astery. The King immediately consented ; and, amidst 
the scoffs of the court, bore the poor man to the steps 
of the High Altar. There the cripple was received by 
Godric the sacristan, and walked away on his own 
restored feet, hanging his stool on the wall for a 
trophy. 

" Before that same High Altar was also believed to 
have been seen one of the Eucharistical portents, so 
frequent in the Middle Ages. A child, 'pure and 
bright like a spirit,' appeared to the King in the sacra- 
mental elements. Leofric, Earl of Mercia, who, with 
his famous countess, Godiva, was present, saw it also. 

" Such as these were the motives of Edward. Un- 
der their influence was fixed what has ever since been 
the local centre of the English monarchy." 



44 The Pleasures of Faith. 

"Such as these were the motives of Edward," says 
the Dean. Yes, certainly ; but such as these also, first, 
were the acts and visions of Edward. Take care that 
you don't slip away, by the help of the glycerine of 
the word "motives," into fancying that all these tales 
are only the after colours and pictorial metaphors of 
sentimental piety. They are either plain truth or black 
lies ; take your choice, — but don't tickle and treat 
yourselves with the prettiness or the grotesqueness of 
them, as if they were Anderssen's fairy tales. Either 
the King did carry the beggar on his back, or he 
didn't ; either Godiva rode through Coventry, or she 
didn't ; either the Earl Leofric saw the vision of the 
bright child at the altar — or he lied like a knave. 
Judge, as you will ; but do not Doubt. 

"The Abbey was fifteen years in building. The 
King spent upon it one-tenth of the property of the 
kingdom. It was to be a marvel of its kind. As in 
its origin it bore the traces of the fantastic and child- 
ish " (I must pause, to ask you to substitute for these 
blameful terms, 'fantastic and childish,' the better ones 
of ' imaginative and pure ') " character of the King 
and of the age ; in its architecture it bore the stamp 
of the peculiar position which Edward occupied in 
English history between Saxon and Norman. By birth 
he was a Saxon, but in all else he was a foreigner. 
Accordingly the Church at Westminster was a wide- 
sweeping innovation on all that had been seen before. 



Alfred to the Confessor. 45 

' Destroying the old building,' he says in his charter, 
'I have built up a new one from the very foundation.' 
Its fame as a ' new style of composition ' lingered in 
the minds of men for generations. It was the first 
cruciform church in England, from which all the rest of 
like shape were copied — an expression of the increas- 
ing hold which, in the tenth century, the idea of the 
Crucifixion had laid on the imagination of Europe. 
The massive roof and pillars formed a contrast with 
the rude wooden rafters and beams of the common 
Saxon churches. Its very size — occupying, as it did, 
almost the whole area of the present building — was 
in itself portentous. The deep foundations, of large 
square blocks of grey stone, were duly laid ; the east 
end was rounded into an apse ; a tower rose in the 
centre, crowned by a cupola of wood. At the western 
end were erected two smaller towers, with five large 
bells. The hard strong stones were richly sculptured ; 
the windows were filled with stained glass ; the roof 
was covered with lead. The cloisters, chapter-house, 
refectory, dormitory, the infirmary, with its spacious 
chapel, if not completed by Edward, were all begun, 
and finished in the next generation on the same plan. 
This structure, venerable as it would be if it had lasted 
to our time, has almost entirely vanished. Possibly 
one vast dark arch in the southern transept, certainly 
the substructures of the dormitory, with their huge 
pillars, 'grand and regal at the bases and capitals,' the 



46 The Pleasures of Faith. 

massive, low-browed passage leading from the great 
cloister to Little Dean's Yard, and some portions of 
the refectory and of the infirmary chapel, remain as 
specimens of the work which astonished the last age 
of the Anglo-Saxon and the first age of the Norman 
monarchy." 

Hitherto I have read to you with only supplemental 
comment. But in the next following passage, with 
which I close my series of extracts, sentence after sen- 
tence occurs, at which as I read, I must raise my hand, 
to mark it for following deprecation, or denial. 

" In the centre of Westminster Abbey thus lies its 
Founder, and such is the story of its foundation. Even . 
apart from the legendary elements in which it is in- 
volved, it is impossible not to be struck by the fantastic 
character of all its circumstances. We seem to be in 
a world of poetry." (I protest, No.) " Edward is four 
centuries later than Ethelbert and Augustine ; but the 
origin of Canterbury is commonplace and prosaic com- 
pared with the origin of Westminster." (Yes, that's 
true.) " We can hardly imagine a figure more incon- 
gruous to the soberness of later times than the quaint, 
irresolute, wayward prince whose chief characteristics 
have just been described. His titles of Confessor and 
Saint belong not to the general instincts of Christen- 
dom ; but to the most transitory feelings of the age." 
(I protest, No.) " His opinions, his prevailing motives, 
were such as in no part of modern Europe would now 



Alfred to the Confessor. 47 

be shared by any educated teacher or ruler." (That's 
true enough.) " But in spite of these irreconcilable 
differences, there was a solid ground for the charm 
which he exercised over his contemporaries. His 
childish and eccentric fancies have passed away;" (I 
protest, No ;) " but his innocent faith and his sympathy 
with his people are qualities which, even in our altered 
times, may still retain their place in the economy of 
the world. Westminster Abbey, so we hear it said, 
sometimes with a cynical sneer, sometimes with a tim- 
orous scruple, has admitted within its walls many who 
have been great without being good, noble with a 
nobleness of the earth earthy, worldly with the wisdom 
of this world. But it is a counterbalancing reflection, 
that the central tomb, round which all those famous 
names have clustered, contains the ashes of one who, 
weak and erring as he was, rests his claims of inter- 
ment here, not on any act of power or fame, but only 
on his artless piety and simple goodness. He, towards 
whose dust was attracted the fierce Norman, and the 
proud Plantagenet, and the grasping Tudor, and the 
fickle Stuart, even the Independent Oliver, the Dutch 
William, and the Hanoverian George, was one whose 
humble graces are within the reach of every man, 
woman, and child of every time, if we rightly part the 
immortal substance from the perishable form." 

Now I have read you these passages from Dean 
Stanley as the most accurately investigatory, the most ' 



48 The Pleasures of Faith. 

generously sympathetic, the most reverently acceptant 
account of these days, and their people, which you can 
yet find in any English history. But consider now, 
point by point, where it leaves you. You are told, 
first, that you are living in an age of poetry. But the 
days of poetry are those of Shakespeare and Milton, 
not of Bede : nay, for their especial wealth in melo- 
dious theology and beautifully rhythmic and pathetic 
meditation, perhaps the days which have given us 
'Hiawatha,' 'In Memoriam,' 'The Christian Year,' and 
the ' Soul's Diary ' of George Macdonald, may be not 
with disgrace compared with those of Caedmon. And 
nothing can be farther different from the temper, noth- 
ing less conscious of the effort, of a poet, than any 
finally authentic document to which you can be re- 
ferred for the relation of a Saxon miracle. 

I will read you, for a perfectly typical example, an 
account of one from Bede's ' Life of St. Cuthbert.' 
The passage is a favourite one of my own, but I do not 
in the least anticipate its producing upon you the sol- 
emnizing effect which I think I could command from 
reading, instead, a piece of 'Marmion,' 'Manfred,' or 
'Childe Harold.' 

..." He had one day left his cell to give advice 
to some visitors ; and when he had finished, he said to 
them, ' I must now go in again, but do you, as you are 
inclined to depart, first take food ; and when you have 



Alfred to the Confessor. 49 

cooked and eaten that goose which is hanging- on the 
wall, go 6n board your vessel in God's name and return 
home.' He then uttered a prayer, and, having blessed 
them, went in. But they, as he had bidden them, took 
some food ; but having enough provisions of their 
own, which they had brought with them, they did not 
touch the goose. 

" But when they had refreshed themselves they tried 
to go on board their vessel, but a sudden storm utterly 
prevented them from putting to sea. They were thus 
detained seven clays in the island by the roughness of 
the waves, and yet they could not call to mind what 
fault they had committed. They therefore returned to 
have an interview with the holy father, and to lament 
to him their detention. He exhorted them to be pa- 
tient, and on the seventh day came out to console their 
sorrow, and to give them pious exhortations. When, 
however, he had entered the house in which they were 
stopping, and saw that the goose was not eaten, he 
reproved their disobedience with mild countenance and 
in gentle language : ' Have you not left the goose still 
hanging in its place ? What wonder is it that the 
storm has prevented your departure ? Put it immedi- 
ately into the caldron, and boil and eat it, that the sea 
may become tranquil, and you may return home.' 

"They immediately did as he commanded; and it- 
happened most wonderfully that the moment the kettle 
began to boil the wind began to cease, and the waves 



50 The Pleasures of Faith. 

to be still. Having finished their repast, and seeing 
that the sea was calm, they went on board, and to their 
great delight, though with shame for their neglect, 
reached home with a fair wind. Now this, as I have 
related, I did not pick up from any chance authority, 
but I had it from one of those who were present, a 
most reverend monk and priest of the same monastery, 
Cynemund, who still lives, known to many in the 
neighbourhood for his years and the purity of his 
life." 

I hope that the memory of this story, which, think- 
ing it myself an extremely pretty one, I have given 
you, not only for a type of sincerity and simplicity, but 
for an illustration of obedience, may at all events quit 
you, for good and all, of the notion that the believers 
and witnesses of miracle were poetical persons. Say- 
ing no more on the head of that allegation, I proceed 
to the Dean's second one, which I cannot but interpret 
as also intended to be injurious,- — that they were art- 
less and childish ones ; and that because of this rude- 
ness and puerility, their motives and opinions would 
not be shared by any statesmen of the present day. 

It is perfectly true that Edward the Confessor was 
himself in many respects of really childish tempera- 
ment ; not therefore, perhaps, as I before suggested to 
you, less venerable. But the age of which we are ex- 
amining the progress, was by no means represented or 



Alfred to the Confessor. 51 

governed by men of similar disposition. It was emi- 
nently productive of — it was altogether governed, 
guided, and instructed by — men of the widest and 
most brilliant faculties, whether constructive or specu- 
lative, that the world till then had seen ; men whose 
acts became the romance, whose thoughts the wisdom, 
and whose arts the treasure, of a thousand years of 
futurity. 

I warned you at the close of last lecture against 
the too agreeable vanity of supposing that the Evan- 
gelization of the world began at St. Martin's, Canter- 
bury. Again and again you will indeed find the stream 
of the Gospel contracting itself into narrow channels, 
and appearing, after long-concealed filtration, through 
veins of unmeasured rock, with the bright resilience 
of a mountain spring. But you will find it the only 
candid, and therefore the only wise, way of research, 
to look in each era of Christendom for the minds of 
culminating power in all its brotherhood of nations ; 
and, careless of local impulse, momentary zeal, pictur- 
esque incident, or vaunted miracle, to fasten your at- 
tention upon the force of character in the men, whom, 
over each newly-converted race, Heaven visibly sets for 
its shepherds and kings, to bring forth judgment unto 
victory. Of these I will name to you, as messengers 
of God and masters of men, five monks and five kings ; 
in whose arms during the range of swiftly gainful 
centuries which we are following:, the life of the world 



5 2 The Pleasures of Faith. 

lay as a nursling babe. Remember, in their successive 
order, — of monks, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, St. Mar- 
tin, St. Benedict, and St. Gregory; of kings, — and 
your national vanity may be surely enough appeased in 
recognizing two of them for Saxon, — Theodoric, Char- 
lemagne, Alfred, Canute, and the Confessor. I will 
read three passages to you, out of the literal words of 
three of these ten men, without saying whose they are, 
that you may compare them with the best and most 
exalted you have read expressing the philosophy, the 
religion, and the policy of to-day, — from which I admit, 
with Dean Stanley, but with a far different meaning 
from his, that they are indeed separate for evermore. 
I give you first, for an example of Philosophy, a 
single sentence, containing all — so far as I can myself 
discern — that it is possible for us to know, or well for 
us to believe, respecting the world and its laws. 

" Of God's Universal Providence, ruling all, and com- 
prising ALL. 

" Wherefore the great and mighty God ; He that made 
man a reasonable creature of soul and body, and He that did 
neither let him pass unpunished for his sin, nor yet excluded 
him from mercy; He that gave, both unto good and bad, 
essence with the stones, power of production with the trees, 
senses with the beasts of the field, and understanding with the 
angels ; He from whom is all being, beauty, form, and order, 
number, weight, and measure ; He from whom all nature, 



Alfred to the Confessor. 53 

mean and excellent, all seeds of form, all forms of seed, all 
motion, both of forms and seeds, derive and have lacing ■ He 
that gave flesh the original beauty, strength, propagation, form 
and shape, health and symmetry ; He that gave the unreason- 
able soul, sense, memory, and appetite ; the reasonable, be- 
sides these, fantasy, understanding, and will ; He, I say, 
having left neither heaven, nor earth, nor angel, nor man, no, 
nor the most base and contemptible creature, neither the bird's 
feather, nor the herb's flower, nor the tree's leaf, without the 
true harmony of their parts, and peaceful concord of compo- 
sition : — It is in no way credible that He would leave the 
kingdoms of men and their bondages and freedom loose and 
uncomprised in the laws of His eternal providence." * 

This for the philosophy.! Next, I take for example 
of the Religion of our ancestors, a prayer, personally 
and passionately offered to the Deity conceived as you 
have this moment heard. 

" O Thou who art the Father of that Son which has awak- 
ened us, and yet urgeth us out of the sleep of our sins, and 
exhorteth us that we become Thine ; " (note you that, for ap- 
prehension of what Redemption means, against your base and 
cowardly modern notion of 'scaping whipping. Not to take 
away the Punishment of Sin, but by His Resurrection to raise 
us out of the sleep of sin itself ! Compare the legend at the 

* From St. Augustine's ' Citic of God,' Book V., ch. xi. (English trans., 
printed by George Eld, 1610.) 

t Here one of the "Stones of Westminster" was shown and commented 



54 The Pleasures of Faith. 

feet of the Lion of the Tribe of Judah in the golden Gospel 
of Charles le Chauve * : — 

" Hie Leo Surgendo portas confregit Averni 
Qui nunquam dormit, nusquam dormitat in iEVUM;") 

" to Thee, Lord, I pray, who art the supreme truth ; for all the 
truth that is, is truth from Thee. Thee I implore, O Lord, 
who art the highest wisdom. Through Thee are wise all those 
that are so. Thou art the true life, and through Thee are 
living all those that are so. Thou art the supreme felicity, 
and from Thee all have become happy that are so. Thou art 
the highest good, and from Thee all beauty springs. Thou 
art the intellectual light, and from Thee man derives his un- 
derstanding. 

"To Thee, O God, I call and speak. Hear, O hear me, 
Lord ! for Thou art my God and my Lord ; my Father and 
my Creator ; my ruler and my hope ; my wealth and my hon- 
our ; my house, my country, my salvation, and my life ! Hear, 
hear me, O Lord ! Few of Thy servants comprehend Thee. 
But Thee alone I love,\ indeed, above all other things. Thee 
I seek : Thee I will follow : Thee I am ready to serve. Un- 
der Thy power I desire to abide, for Thou alone art the Sov- 
ereign of all. I pray Thee to command me as Thou wilt." 

You see this prayer is simply the expansion of that 
clause of the Lord's Prayer which most men eagerly 

* At Munich: the leaf has been exquisitely drawn and legend communicated 
to me by Professor Westwood. It is written in gold on purple. 

t Meaning — not that he is of those few, but that, without comprehending, at 
least, as a dog, he can love. 



Alfred to the Confessor. 55 

omit from it, — Fiat voluntas tua. In being so, it sums 

the Christian prayer of all ages. See now, in the third 

place, how far this king's letter I am going to read to 
you sums also Christian Policy. 

" Wherefore I render high thanks to Almighty God, for the 
happy accomplishment of all the desires which I have set 
before me, and for the satisfying of my every wish. 

" Now therefore, be it known to you all, that to Almighty 
God Himself I have, on my knees, devoted my life, to the 
end that in all things I may do justice, and with justice and 
Tightness rule the kingdoms and peoples under me ; through- 
out everything preserving an impartial judgment. If, hereto- 
fore, I have, through being, as young men are, impulsive or 
careless, done anything unjust, I mean, with God's help, to 
lose no time in remedying my fault. To which end I call 
to witness my counsellors, to whom I have entrusted the coun- 
sels of the kingdom, and I charge them that by no means, 
be it through fear of me, or the favour of any other powerful 
personage, to consent to any injustice, or to suffer any to shoot 
out in any part of my kingdom. I charge all my viscounts 
and those set over my whole kingdom, as they wish to keep 
my friendship or their own safety, to use no unjust force to 
any man, rich or poor ; let all men, noble and not noble, rich 
and poor alike, be able to obtain their rights under the law's 
justice ; and from that law let there be no deviation, either 
to favour the king or any powerful person, nor to raise money 
for me. I have no need of money raised by what is unfair. 
I also would have you know that I go now to make peace 



56 The Pleasures of Faith. 

and firm treaty by the counsels of all my subjects, with those 
nations and people who wished, had it been possible for them 
to do so, which it was not, to deprive us alike of kingdom 
and of life. God brought down their strength to nought: and 
may He of His benign love preserve us on our throne and in 
honour. Lastly, when I have made peace with the neighbour- 
ing nations, and settled and pacified all my dominions in the 
East, so that we may nowhere have any war or enmity to fear, 
I mean to come to England this summer, as soon as I can fit 
out vessels to sail. My reason, however, in sending this letter 
first is to "let all the people of my kingdom share in the joy 
of my welfare : for as you yourselves know, I have never spared 
myself or my labour ; nor will I ever do so, where my people 
are really in want of some good that I can do them." 

What think you now, in candour and honour, you 
youth of the latter days, — what think you of these 
types of the thought, devotion, and government, which 
not in words, but pregnant and perpetual fact, ani- 
mated these which you have been accustomed to call 
the Dark Ages ? 

The Philosophy is Augustine's ; the Prayer Alfred's ; 
and the Letter Canute's. 

And, whatever you may feel respecting the beauty 
or wisdom of these sayings, be assured of one thing 
above all, that they are sincere ; and of another, less 
often observed, that they are joyful. 

Be assured, in the first place, that they are sincere. 
The ideas of diplomacy and priestcraft are of recent 



Alfred to the Confessor. 57 

times. No false knight or lying priest ever prospered, 
I believe, in any age, but certainly not in the dark 
ones. Men prospered then, only in following openly- 
declared purposes, and preaching candidly beloved and 
trusted creeds. 

And that they did so prosper, in the degree in which 
they accepted and proclaimed the Christian Gospel, 
may be seen by any of you in your historical reading, 
however partial, if only you will admit the idea that it 
could be so, and was likely to be so. You are all of 
you in the habit of supposing that temporal prosperity 
is owing either to worldly chance or to worldly pru- 
dence ; and is never granted in any visible relation to 
states of religious temper. Put that treacherous doubt 
away from you, with disdain ; take for basis of reason- 
ing the noble postulate, that the elements of Christian 
faith are sound, — instead of the base one, that they 
are deceptive ; reread the great story of the world in 
that light, and see what a vividly real, yet miraculous 
tenor, it will then bear to you. 

Their faith then, I tell you first, was sincere ; I tell 
you secondly that it was, in a degree few of us can now 
conceive, joyful. We continually hear of the trials, 
sometimes of the victories, of Faith, — but scarcely 
ever of its pleasures. Whereas, at this time, you will 
find that the chief delight of all good men was in the 
recognition of the goodness and wisdom of the Master, 
who had come to dwell with them upon earth. It is 



58 The Pleasures of Faith. 

almost impossible for you to conceive the vividness of 
this sense in them ; it is totally impossible for you to 
conceive the comfort, peace, and force of it. In every- 
thing that you now do or seek, you expose yourselves 
to countless miseries of shame and disappointment, 
because in your doing you depend on nothing but your 
own powers, and in seeking choose only your own 
gratification. You cannot for the most part conceive 
of any work but for your own interests, or the interests 
of others about whom you are anxious in the same 
faithless way ; everything about which passion is ex- 
cited in you or skill exerted is some object of mate- 
rial life, and the idea of doing anything except for your 
own praise or profit has narrowed itself into little more 
than the precentor's invitation to the company with 
little voice and less practice to " sing to the praise and 
glory of God." 

I have said that you cannot imagine the feeling of 
the energy of daily life applied in the real meaning of 
those words. You cannot imagine it, but you can 
prove it. Are any of you willing, simply as a philo- 
sophical experiment in the greatest of sciences, to 
adopt the principles and feelings of these men of a 
thousand years ago for a given time, say for a year ? 
It cannot possibly do you any harm to try, and you 
cannot possibly learn what is true in these things, 
without trying. If after a year's experience of such 
method you find yourself no happier than before, at 



Alfred to the Confessor. 59 

least you will be able to support your present opinions 
at once with more grace and more modesty ; having 
conceded the trial it asked for, to the opposite side. 
Nor in acting temporarily on a faith you do not see to 
be reasonable, do you compromise your own integrity 
more, than in conducting, under a chemist's directions, 
an experiment of which he foretells inexplicable conse- 
quences. And you need not doubt the power you 
possess over your own minds to do this. Were faith 
not voluntary, it could not be praised, and would not 
be rewarded. 

If you are minded thus to try, begin each day with 
Alfred's prayer, — fiat voluntas tua ; resolving that you 
will stand to it, and that nothing that happens in the 
course of the day shall displease you. Then set to any 
work you have in hand with the sifted and purified 
resolution that ambition shall not mix with it, nor love 
of gain, nor desire of pleasure more than is appointed 
for you ; and that no anxiety shall touch you as to its 
issue, nor any impatience nor regret if it fail. Imagine 
that the thing is being done through you, not by you ; 
that the good of it may never be known, but that at 
least, unless by your rebellion or foolishness, there can 
come no evil into it, nor wrong chance to it. Resolve 
also with steady industry to do what you can for the 
help of your country and its honour, and the honour of 
its God ; and that you will not join hands in its iniquity, 
nor turn aside from its misery ; and that in all you do 



60 The Pleasures of Faith. 

and feel you will look frankly for the immediate help 
and direction, and to your own consciences, expressed 
approval, of God. Live thus, and believe, and with 
swiftness of answer proportioned to the frankness of 
the trust, most surely the God of hope will fill you with 
all joy and peace in believing. 

But, if you will not do this, if you have not courage 
nor heart enough to break away the fetters of earth, 
and take up the sensual bed of it, and walk ; if you say 
that you are bound to win this thing, and become the 
other thing, and that the wishes of your friends, — and 
the interests of your family, — and the bias of your 
genius, — and the expectations of your college, — and 
all the rest of the bow-wow-wow of the wild dog-world, 
must be attended to, whether you like it or no, — then, 
at least, for shame give up talk about being free or 
independent creatures ; recognize yourselves for slaves 
in whom the thoughts are put in ward with their 
bodies, and their hearts manacled with their hands : 
and then at least also, for shame, if you refuse to be- 
lieve that ever there were men who gave their souls to 
God, — know and confess how surely there are those 
who sell them to His adversary. 



LECTURE III. 



THE PLEASURES OF DEED. 



Alfred to Coeur de Lion. 



LECTURE III. 
THE PLEASURES OF DEED. 



ALFRED TO CCEUR DE LION. 

IT was my endeavour, in the preceding lecture, to 
vindicate the thoughts and arts of our Saxon an- 
cestors from whatever scorn might lie couched under 
the terms applied to them by Dean Stanley, — ' fantas- 
tic,' and 'childish.' To-day my task must be carried 
forward, first, in asserting the grace in fantasy, and 
the force in infancy, of the English mind, before the 
Conquest, against the allegations contained in the 
final passage of Dean Stanley's description of the first 
founded Westminster ; a passage which accepts and 
asserts, more distinctly than any other equally brief 
statement I have met with, the to my mind extremely 
disputable theory, that the Norman invasion was in 
every respect a sanitary, moral, and intellectual bless- 
ing to England, and that the arrow which slew her 
Harold was indeed the Arrow of the Lord's deliv- 
erance. 

63 



64 The Pleasures of Deed. 

" The Abbey itself," says Dean Stanley, — " the 
chief work of the Confessor's life, — was the portent 
of the mighty future. When Harold stood beside his 
sister Edith, on the day of the dedication, and signed 
his name with hers as witness to the Charter of the 
Abbey, he might have seen that he was sealing his 
own doom, and preparing for his own destruction. The 
solid pillars, the ponderous arches, the huge edifice, 
with triple tower and sculptured stones and storied win- 
dows, that arose in the place and in the midst of the 
humble wooden churches and wattled tenements of the 
Saxon period, might have warned the nobles who were 
present that the days of their rule were numbered, 
and that the avenging, civilizing, stimulating hand of 
another and a mightier race was at work, which would 
change the whole face of their language, their manners, 
their Church, and their commonwealth. The Abbey, 
so far exceeding the demands of the dull and stagnant 
minds of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, was founded not 
only in faith, but in hope : in the hope that England 
had yet a glorious career to run ; that the line of her 
sovereigns would not be broken, even when the race of 
Alfred had ceased to reign." 

There must surely be some among my hearers who 
are startled, if not offended, at being told in the terms 
which I emphasized in this sentence, that the minds 
of our Saxon fathers were, although fantastic, dull, 
and, although childish, stagnant ; that farther, in their 



Alfred to Coeur de Lion. 65 

fantastic stagnation, they were savage, — and in their 
innocent dullness, criminal ; so that the future charac- 
ter and fortune of the race depended on the critical 
advent of the didactic and disciplinarian Norman baron, 
at once to polish them, stimulate, and chastise. 

Before I venture to say a word in distinct arrest of 
this judgment, I will give you a chart, as clear as the 
facts observed in the two previous lectures allow, of 
the state and prospects of the Saxons, when this vio- 
lent benediction of conquest happened to them : and 
especially I would rescue, in the measure that justice 
bids, the memory even of their Pagan religion from 
the general scorn in which I used Carlyle's description 
of the idol of ancient Prussia as universally exponent of 
the temper of Northern devotion. That Triglaph, or 
Triglyph Idol, (derivation of Triglaph wholly unknown 
to me — I use Triglyph only for my own handiest epi- 
thet), last set up, on what is now St. Mary's hill in 
Brandenburg, in 1023, belonged indeed to a people 
wonderfully like the Saxons, — geographically their 
close neighbours, — in habits of life, and aspect of 
native land, scarcely distinguishable from them, — in 
Carlyle's words, a " strong-boned, iracund, herdsman 
and fisher people, highly averse to be interfered with, 
in their religion especially, and inhabiting a moory flat 
country, full of lakes and woods, but with plenty also 
of alluvial mud, grassy, frugiferous, apt for the plough " 
— in all things like the Saxons, except, as I read the 



66 The Pleasures of Deed. 

matter, in that ' aversion to be interfered with ' which 
you modern English think an especially Saxon charac- 
ter in you, — but which is, on the contrary, you will 
find on examination, by no means Saxon ; but only 
Wendisch, Czech, Serbic, Sclavic, — other hard names 
I could easily find for it among the tribes of that vehe- 
mently heathen old Preussen — " resolutely worshipful 
of places of oak trees, of wooden or stone idols, of 
Bangputtis, Patkullos, and I know not what diabolic 
dumb blocks." Your English "dislike to be interfered 
with " is in absolute fellowship with these, but only 
gathers itself in its places of Stalks, or chimneys, in- 
stead of oak trees, round its idols of iron, instead of 
wood, diabolically vocal now ; strident, and sibilant, 
instead of dumb. 

Far other than these, their neighbour Saxons, Jutes 
and Angles! — tribes between whom the distinctions 
are of no moment whatsoever, except that an English 
boy or girl may with grace remember that ' Old Eng- 
land,' exactly and strictly so called, was the small dis- 
trict in the extreme south of Denmark, totally with its 
islands estimable at sixty miles square of dead flat land. 
Directly south of it, the definitely so-called Saxons 
held the western shore of Holstein, with the estuary 
of the Elbe, and the sea-mark isle, Heligoland. But 
since the principal temple of Saxon worship was close 
to Leipsic,* we may include under our general term, 

* Turner, vol. i., p. 223. 



Alfj'ed to Caeur de Lion. 67 

Saxons, the inhabitants of the whole level district of 
North Germany, from the Gulf of Flensburg to the 
Hartz ; and, eastward, all the country watered by the 
Elbe as far as Saxon Switzerland. 

Of the character of this race I will not here speak 
at any length : only note of it this essential point, that 
their religion was at once more practical and more im- 
aginative than that of the Norwegian peninsula ; the 
Norse religion being the conception rather of natural 
than moral powers, but the Saxon, primarily of moral, 
as the lords of natural — their central divine image, 
Irminsul,* holding the standard of peace in her right 
hand, a balance in her left. Such a religion may de- 
generate into mere slaughter and rapine ; but it has 
the making in it of the noblest men. 

More practical at all events, whether for good or 
evil, in this trust in a future reward for courage and 
purity, than the mere Scandinavian awe of existing 
Earth and Cloud, the Saxon religion was also more 
imaginative, in its nearer conception of human feeling 
in divine creatures. And when this wide hope and 
high reverence had distinct objects of worship and 
prayer, offered to them by Christianity, the Saxons 
easily became pure, passionate, and thoughtful Chris- 
tians ; while the Normans, to the last, had the greatest 
difficulty in apprehending the Christian teaching of the 
Franks, and still deny the power of Christianity, even 
when they have become inveterate in its form. 

* Properly plural 'Images' — Irminsul and Irminsula. 



68 The Pleasures of Deed. 

Quite the deepest-thoughted creatures of the then 
animate world, it "seems to me, these Saxon ploughmen 
of the sand or the sea, with their worshipped deity of 
Beauty and Justice, a red rose on her banner, for best 
of gifts,' and in her right hand, instead of a sword, a 
balance, for due doom, without wrath, — of retribution 
in her left. Far other than the Wends, though stub- 
born enough, they too, in battle rank, — seven times 
rising from defeat against Charlemagne, and unsubdued 
but by death — yet, by no means in that John Bull's 
manner of yours, 'averse to be interfered with,' in their 
opinions, or their religion. Eagerly docile on the 
contrary — joyfully reverent — instantly and gratefully 
acceptant of whatever better insight or oversight a 
stranger could bring them, of the things of God or 
man. 

And let me here ask you especially to take account 
of that origin of the true bearing of the Flag of 
England, the Red Rose. Her own madness defiled 
afterwards alike the white and red, into images of the 
paleness, or the crimson, of death ; but the Saxon Rose 
was the symbol of heavenly beauty and peace. 

I told you in my first lecture that one swift require- 
ment in our school would be to produce a beautiful 
map of England, including old Northumberland, giving 
the whole country, in its real geography, between the 
Frith of Forth and Straits of Dover, and with only six 
sites of habitation given, besides those of Edinburgh 



Alfred to Cceur de Lion. 69 

and London, — namely, those of Canterbury and Win- 
chester, York and Lancaster, Holy Island and Melrose ; 
the latter instead of Iona, because, as we have seen, 
the influence of St. Columba expires with the advance 
of Christianity, while that of Cuthbert of Melrose con- 
nects itself with the most sacred feelings of the entire 
Northumbrian kingdom, and Scottish border, down 
to the days of Scott — wreathing also into its circle 
many of the legends of Arthur. Will you forgive my 
connecting the personal memory of having once had 
a wild rose gathered for me, in the glen of Thomas the 
Rhymer, by the daughter of one of the few remaining 
Catholic houses of Scotland, with the pleasure I have 
in reading to you this following true account of the 
origin of the name of St. Cuthbert's birthplace; — the 
rather because I owe it to friendship of the same date, 
with Mr. Cockburn Muir, of Melrose. 

" To those who have eyes to read it," says Mr. Muir, 
" the name ' Melrose ' is written full and fair, on the 
fair face of all this reach of the valley. The name is 
anciently spelt Mailros, and later, Malros, never Mul- 
ros ; (' Mul ' being the Celtic word taken to mean 
'bare'). Ros is Rose; the forms Meal or Mol imply 
great quantity or number. Thus Malros means the 
place of many roses. 

" This is precisely the notable characteristic of the 
neighbourhood. The wild rose is indigenous. There 
is no nook nor cranny, no bank nor brae, which is not, 



jo The Pleasures of Deed. 

in the time of roses, ablaze with their exuberant loveli- 
ness. In gardens, the cultured rose is so prolific that 
it spreads literally like a weed. But it is worth sug- 
gestion that the word may be of the same stock as the 
Hebrew rSs/i (translated ros by the Septuagint), mean- 
ing chief, principal, while it is also the name of some 
flower ; but of which flower is now unknown. Affini- 
ties of rosh are not far to seek ; Sanskrit, Raj'(a), 
Ra(ja)m; Latin, Rex, Reg(ma)." 

I leave it to Professor Max Muller to certify or cor- 
rect for you the details of Mr. Cockburn's research,* — 
this main head of it I can positively confirm, that in old 



* I had not time to quote it fully in the lecture ; and in my ignorance, alike 
of Keltic and Hebrew, can only submit it here to the reader's examination. 
" The ancient Cognizance of the town confirms this etymology beyond doubt, 
with customary heraldic precision. The shield bears a Rose; with a Maul, as 
the exact phonetic equivalent for the expletive. If the herald had needed to 
express ' bare promontory,' quite certainly he would have managed it somehow. 
Not only this, the Earls of Haddington were first created Earls of Melrose 
(1619) ; and their Shield, quarterly, is charged, for Melrose, in 2nd and 3rd (fesse 
wavy between) three Roses gu. 

" Beyond this ground of certainty, we may indulge in a little excursus into 
lingual affinities of wide range. The root inol is clear enough. It is of the same 
stock as the Greek mala, Latin mul(tum), and Hebrew m'la. But, Rose ? We 
call her Queen of Flowers, and since before the Persian poets made much of 
her, she was everywhere Regina Florum. Why should not the name mean 
..imply the Queen, the Chief ? Now, so few who know Keltic know also 
Hebrew, and so few who know Hebrew know also Keltic, that few know the sur- 
prising extent of the affinity that exists — clear as day — between the Keltic and 
the Hebrew vocabularies. That the word Rose may be a case in point is not 
hazardously speculative." 



Alfred to Cceur de Lion. 71 

Scotch, — that of Bishop Douglas, — the word ' Rois ' 
stands alike for King, and Rose. 

Summing now the features I have too shortly speci- 
fied in the Saxon character, — its imagination, its 
docility, its love of knowledge, and its love of beauty, 
you will be prepared to accept my conclusive state- 
ment, that they gave rise to a form of Christian faith 
which appears to me, in the present state of my knowl- 
edge, one of the purest and most intellectual ever at- 
tained in Christendom; — never yet understood, partly 
because of the extreme rudeness of its expression in 
the art of manuscripts, and partly because, on account 
of its very purity, it sought no expression in architec- 
ture, being a religion of daily life, and humble lodging. 
For these two practical reasons, first ; — and for this 
more weighty third, that the intellectual character of it 
is at the same time most truly, as Dean Stanley told 
you, childlike ; showing itself in swiftness of imagina- 
tive apprehension, and in the fearlessly candid applica- 
tion of great principles to small things. Its character 
in this kind may be instantly felt by any sympathetic 
and gentle person who will read carefully the book I 
have already quoted to you, the Venerable Bede's life 
of St. Cuthbert ; and the intensity and sincerity of it 
in the highest orders of the laity, by simply counting 
the members of Saxon Royal families who ended their 
lives in monasteries. 

Now, at the very moment when this faith, innocence, 



72 The Pleasures of Deed. 

and ingenuity were on the point of springing up into 
their fruitage, comes the Northern invasion ; of the 
real character of which you can gain a far truer esti- 
mate by studying Alfred's former resolute contest with 
and victory over the native Norman in his paganism, 
than by your utmost endeavours to conceive the char- 
acter of the afterwards invading Norman, disguised, 
but not changed, by Christianity. The Norman could 
not, in the nature of him, become a Christian at all ; 
and he never did ; — he only became, at his best, the 
enemy of the Saracen. What he was, and what alone 
he was capable of being, I will try to-day to explain. 

And here I must advise you that in all points of 
history relating to the period between 800 and 1200, 
you will find M. Viollet le Due, incidentally throughout 
his 'Dictionary of Architecture,' the best-informed, 
most intelligent, and most thoughtful of guides. His 
knowledge of architecture, carried down into the most 
minutely practical details, — (which are often the most 
significant), and embracing, over the entire surface of 
France, the buildings even of the most secluded vil- 
lages ; his artistic enthusiasm, balanced by the acutest 
sagacity, and his patriotism, by the frankest candour, 
render his analysis of history during that active and 
constructive period the most valuable known to me, 
and certainly, in its field, exhaustive. Of the later 
nationality his account is imperfect, owing to his pro- 
fessional interest in the mere science of architecture, 



Alfred to Cosur. de Lion. 7$ 

and comparative insensibility to the power of sculpture ; 
— but of the time with which we are now concerned, 
whatever he tells you must be regarded with grateful 
attention. 

I introduce, therefore, the Normans to you, on their 
first entering France, under his descriptive terms of 
them.* 

" As soon as they were established on the soil, these 
barbarians became the most hardy and active builders. 
Within the space of a century and a half, they had 
covered the country on which they had definitely 
landed, with religious, monastic, and civil edifices, of 
an extent and richness then little common. It is diffi- 
cult to suppose that they had brought from Norway the 
elements of art,f but they were possessed by a per- 
sisting and penetrating spirit ; their brutal force did 
not want for grandeur. Conquerors, they raised castles 
to assure their domination ; they soon recognized the 
Moral force of the clergy, and endowed it richly. 
Eager always to attain their end, when once they saw 
it, they never left one of their enterprises unfinished, and 
in that they differed completely from the Southern 
inhabitants of Gaul. Tenacious extremely, they were 
perhaps the only ones among the barbarians estab- 
lished in France who had ideas of order ; the only ones 

* Article " Architecture," vol. i., p. 138. 

t They had brought some, of a variously Charybdic, Serpentine, and Diabolic 
character. — J. R. 



74 The Pleasures of Deed. 

who knew how to preserve their conquests, and com- 
pose a state. They found the remains of the Car- 
thaginian arts on the territory where they planted 
themselves, they mingled with those their national 
genius, positive, grand, and yet supple." 

Supple, ' Delie,' — capable of change and play of the 
mental muscle, in the way that savages are not. I do 
not, myself, grant this suppleness to the Norman, the 
less because another sentence of M. le Due's, occur- 
ring incidentally in his account of the archivolt, is of 
extreme counter-significance, and wide application. 
"The Norman arch," he says, "is never derived from 
traditional classic forms, but only from mathematical 
arrangement of line." Yes ; that is true : the Norman 
arch is never derived from classic forms. The cathe- 
dral,* whose aisles you saw or might have seen, yester- 
day, interpenetrated with light, whose vaults you might 
have heard prolonging the sweet divisions of majestic 
sound, would have been built in that stately symme- 
try by Norman law, though never an arch at Rome had 
risen round her field of blood, — though never her 
Sublician bridge had been petrified by her Augustan 
pontifices. But the decoration, though not the struc- 
ture of those arches, they owed to another race,f 
whose words they stole without understanding, though 
three centuries before, the Saxon understood, and 

* Of Oxford, during the afternoon service, 
f See the concluding section of the lecture. 



Alfred to Cceur de Lion. 75 

used, to express the most solemn majesty of his King- 
hood, — 

"EGO EDGAR, TOTIVS ALBIONIS" — 

not Rex, that would have meant the King of Kent or 
Mercia, not of England, — no, nor Imperator ; that 
would have meant only the profane power of Rome, 
but BASILEVS, meaning a King who reigned with 
sacred authority given by Heaven and Christ. 

With far meaner thoughts, both of themselves and 
their powers, the Normans set themselves to build 
impregnable military walls, and sublime religious ones, 
in the best possible practical ways ; but they no more 
made books of their church fronts than of their bastion 
flanks ; and cared, in the religion they accepted, nei- 
ther for its sentiments nor its promises, but only for 
its immediate results on national order. 

As I read them, they were men wholly of this 
world, bent on doing the most in it, and making the 
best of it that they could ; — men, to their death, of 
Deed, never pausing, changing, repenting, or anticipat- 
ing, more than the completed square, wev if/oyov, of 
their battle, their keep, and their cloister. Soldiers 
before and after everything, they learned the lockings 
and bracings of their stones primarily in defence 
against the battering-ram and the projectile, and es- 
teemed the pure circular arch for its distributed and 
equal strength more than for its beauty. " I believe 



J 6 The Pleastcres of Deed. 

again," says M. le Due,* " that the feudal castle never 
arrived at its perfectness till after the Norman inva- 
sion, and that this race of the North was the first to 
apply a defensive system under unquestionable laws, 
soon followed by the nobles of the Continent, after 
they had, at their own expense, learned their supe- 
riority." 

The next sentence is a curious one. I pray your 
attention to it. " The defensive system of the Norman 
is born of a profound sentiment of distrust and cunning, 
foreign to the character of the Frank." You will find in 
all my previous notices of the French, continual insist- 
ance upon their natural Franchise, and also, if you take 
the least pains in analysis of their literature down to 
this day, that the idea of falseness is to them indeed 
more hateful than to any other European nation. To 
take a quite cardinal instance. If you compare Lucian's 
and Shakespeare's Timon with Moliere's Alceste, you 
will find the Greek and English misanthropes dwell 
only on men's ingratitude to themselves, but Alceste, 
on their falsehood to each other. 

Now hear M. le Due farther : 

"The castles built between the tenth and twelfth 
centuries along the Loire, Gironde, and Seine, that is 
to say, along the lines of the Norman invasions, and 
in the neighbourhood of their possessions, have a 
peculiar and uniform character which one finds neither 

* Article " Chateau," vol. iii., p. 65. 



Alfred to Cccur de Lion. yy 

in central France, nor in Burgundy, nor can there be 
any need for us to throw light on (/aire ressortir) the 
superiority of the warrior spirit of the Normans, during 
the later times of the Carlovingian epoch, over the 
spirit of the chiefs of Frank descent, established on 
the Gallo-Roman soil." There's a bit of honesty in a 
Frenchman for you ! 

I have just said that they valued religion chiefly for 
its influence of order in the present world : being in 
this, observe, as nearly as may be the exact reverse 
of modern believers, or persons who profess to be 
such, — of whom it may be generally alleged, too truly, 
that they value religion with respect to their future 
bliss rather than their present duty ; and are therefore 
continually careless of its direct commands, with easy 
excuse to themselves for disobedience to them. Where- 
as the Norman, finding in his own heart an irresistible 
impulse to action, and perceiving himself to be set, 
with entirely strong body, brain, and will, in the midst 
of a weak and dissolute confusion of all things, takes 
from the Bible instantly into his conscience every exhor- 
tation to Do and to Govern ; and becomes, with all 
his might and understanding, a blunt and rough ser- 
vant, knecht, or knight of God, liable to much misap- 
prehension, of course, as to the services immediately 
required of him, but supposing, since the whole make 
of him, outside and in, is a soldier's, that God meant 
him for a soldier, and that he is to establish, by main 



j 8 The Pleasures of Deed. 

force, the Christian faith and works all over the world 
so far as he comprehends them ; not merely with the 
Mahometan indignation against spiritual error, but 
with a sound and honest soul's dislike of material error, 
and resolution to extinguish that, even if perchance 
found in the spiritual persons to whom, in their office, 
he yet rendered total reverence. 

Which force and faith in him I may best illustrate 
by merely putting together the broken paragraphs of 
Sismondi's account of the founding of the Norman 
Kingdom of Sicily : virtually contemporary with the 
conquest of England. 

" The Normans surpassed all the races of the west 
in their ardour for pilgrimages. They would not, to 
go into the Holy Land, submit to the monotony* of a 
long sea voyage — the rather that they found not on 
the Mediterranean the storms or dangers they had 
rejoiced to encounter on their own sea. They trav- 
ersed by land the whole of France and Italy, trusting 
to their swords to procure the necessary subsistence,! 
if the charity of the faithful did not enough provide 
for it with alms. The towns of Naples, Amain,- Gaeta, 
and Bari, held constant commerce with Syria ; and fre- 
quent miracles, it was believed, illustrated the Monte 

* I give Sismondi's idea as it stands, but there was no question in the matter 
of monotony or of danger. The journey was made on foot because it was the 
most laborious way, and the most humble. 

f See farther on, p. no, the analogies with English arrangements of the 
same kind. 



Alfred to Cccur de Lion. 79 

Cassino, (St. Benedict again !) on the road of Naples, 
and the Mount of Angels (Garganus) above Bari." 
(Querceta Gargani — verily, laborant ; now, et orant.) 
"The pilgrims wished to visit during their journey the 
monasteries built on these two mountains, and there- 
fore nearly always, either going or returning to the 
Holy Land, passed through Magna Grascia. 

" In one of the earliest years of the eleventh cen- 
tury, about forty of these religious travellers, having 
returned from the Holy Land, chanced to have met 
together in Salerno at the moment when a small Sar- 
acen fleet came to insult the town, and demand of it 
a military contribution. The inhabitants of South 
Italy, at this time, abandoned to the delights of their 
enchanted climate, had lost nearly all military courage, 
The Salernitani saw with astonishment forty Norman 
knights, after having demanded horses and arms from 
the Prince of Salerno, order the gates of the town to 
be opened, charge the Saracens fearlessly, and put 
them to flight. The Salernitani followed, however, the 
example given them by these brave warriors, and those 
of the Mussulmans who escaped their swords were 
forced to re-embark in all haste. 

"The Prince of Salerno, Guaimar III., tried in vain 
to keep the warrior-pilgrims at his court : but at his 
solicitation other companies established themselves on 
the rocks of Salerno and Amain, until, on Christmas 
Day, 1041, (exactly a quarter of a century before the 



So The Pleasures of Deed. 

coronation here at Westminster of the Conqueror,) 
they gathered their scattered forces at Aversa,* twelve 
groups of them under twelve chosen counts, and all 
under the Lombard Ardoin, as commander-in-chief." 
Be so good as to note that, — a marvellous key-note 
of historical fact about the unjesting Lombards. I 
cannot find the total Norman number : the chief con- 
tingent, under William of the Iron Arm, the son of 
Tancred of Hauteville, was only of three hundred 
knights ; the Count of Aversa's troop, of the same 
number, is named as an important part of the little 
army — admit it for ten times Tancred's, three thou- 
sand men in all. At Aversa, these three thousand 
men form, coolly on Christmas Day, 1041, the design 
of — well, I told you they didn't design much, only, 
now we're here, we may as well, while we're about it, 
— overthrow the Greek empire ! That was their little 
game! — a Christmas mumming to purpose. The fol- 
lowing year, the whole of Apulia was divided among 
them. 

I will not spoil, by abstracting, the magnificent fol- 
lowing history of Robert Guiscard, the most wonderful 
soldier of that or any other time : I leave you to finish 
it for yourselves, only asking you to read together with 
it, the sketch, in Turner's history of the Anglo-Saxons, 
of Alfred's long previous war with the Norman Hast- 
ing ; pointing out to you for foci of character in each 

* In Lombardy, south of Pavia. 



Alfred to Cceur de Lion. Si 

contest, the culminating incidents of naval battle. In 
Guiscard's struggle with the Greeks, he encounters for 
their chief naval force the Venetian fleet under the 
Doge Domenico Selvo. The Venetians are at this 
moment undoubted masters in all naval warfare ; the 
Normans are worsted easily the first day, — the second 
day, fighting harder, they are defeated again, and so 
disastrously that the Venetian Doge takes no precau- 
tions against them on the third day, thinking them 
utterly disabled. Guiscard attacks him again on the 
third day, with the mere wreck of his own ships, and 
defeats the tired and amazed Italians finally ! 

The sea-fight between Alfred's ships and those of 
Hasting, ought to be still more memorable to us. 
Alfred, as I noticed in last lecture, had built war ships 
nearly twice as long as the Normans', swifter, and 
steadier on the waves. Six Norman ships were rav- 
aging the Isle of Wight ; Alfred sent nine of his own 
to take them. The King's fleet found the Northmen's 
embayed, and three of them aground. The three others 
engaged Alfred 's nine, twice their size ; two of the Viking 
ships were taken, but the third escaped, with only five 
men ! A nation which verily took its pleasures in its 
Deeds. 

But before I can illustrate farther either their deeds 
or their religion, I must for an instant meet the objec- 
tion which I suppose the extreme probity of the nine- 
teenth century must feel acutely against these men, — 
that they all lived by thieving. 



82 The Pleastires oj Deed. 

Without venturing to allude to the raison d'itre of 
the present French and English Stock Exchanges, I 
will merely ask any of you here, whether of Saxon or 
Norman blood, to define for himself what he means by 
the "possession of India." I have no doubt that you 
all wish to keep India in order, and in like manner I 
have assured you that Duke William wished to keep 
England in order. If you will read the lecture on the 
life of Sir Herbert Edwardes, which I hope to give in 
London after finishing this course,* you will see how a 
Christian British officer can, and does, verily, and with 
his whole heart, keep in order such part of India as 
may be entrusted to him, and in so doing, secure our 
Empire. But the silent feeling and practice of the 
nation about India is based on quite other motives than 
Sir Herbert's. Every mutiny, every danger, every ter- 
ror, and every crime, occurring under, or paralyzing, 
our Indian legislation, arises directly out of our na- 
tional desire to live on the loot of India, and the notion 
always entertained by English young gentlemen and 
ladies of good position, falling in love with each other 
without immediate prospect of establishment in Bel- 
grave Square, that they can find in India, instantly on 
landing, a bungalow ready furnished with the loveliest 
fans, china, and shawls, — ices and sherbet at com- 

* This was prevented by the necessity for the re-arrangement of my terminal 
Oxford lectures : I am now preparing that on Sir Herbert for publication in a 
somewhat expanded form. 



Alfred to Cccur de Lion. 83 

mand, — four-and-twenty slaves succeeding each other 
hourly to swing the punkah, and a regiment with a 
beautiful band tb "keep order" outside, all round the 
house. 

Entreating your pardon for what may seem rude in 
these personal remarks, I will further entreat you to 
read my account of the death of Cceur de Lion in the 
third number of 'Fors Clavigera' — and also the scenes 
in ' Ivanhoe ' between Cceur de Lion and Locksley ; 
and commending these few passages to your quiet 
consideration, I proceed to give you another anecdote 
or two of the Normans in Italy, twelve years later than 
those given above, and, therefore, only thirteen years 
before the battle of Hastings. 

Their division of South Italy among them especially, 
and their defeat of Venice, had alarmed everybody 
considerably, — especially the Pope, Leo IX., who did 
not understand this manifestation of their piety. He 
sent to Henry III. of Germany, to whom he owed his 
Popedom, for some German knights, and got five hun- 
dred spears ; gathered out of all Apulia, Campania, and 
the March of Ancona, what Greek and Latin troops 
were to be had, to join his own army of the patrimony 
of St. Peter ; and the holy Pontiff, with this numerous 
army, but no general, began the campaign by a pil- 
grimage with all his troops to Monte Cassino, in order 
to obtain, if it might be, St. Benedict for general. 

Against the Pope's collected masses, with St. 15cm •- 



84 The Pleasures of Deed. 

diet, their contemplative but at first inactive general, 
stood the little army of Normans, — certainly not more 
than the third of their number — but with Robert 
Guiscard for captain, and under him his brother, 
Humphrey of Hauteville, and Richard of Aversa. Not 
in fear, but in devotion, they prayed the Pope 'avec 
instance,' — to say on what conditions they could ap- 
pease his anger, and live in peace under him. But 
the Pope would hear of nothing but their evacuation 
of Italy. Whereupon, they had to settle the question 
in the Norman manner. 

The two armies met in front of Civitella, on Water- 
loo day, 1 8th June, thirteen years, as I said, before the 
battle of Hastings. The German knights were the 
heart of the Pope's army, but they were only five hun- 
dred ; the Normans surrounded them first, and slew 
them, nearly to a man — and then made extremely 
short work with the Italians and Greeks. The Pope, 
with the wreck of them, fled into Civitella ; but the 
townspeople dared not defend their walls, and thrust 
the Pope himself out of their gates — to meet, alone, 
the Norman army. 

He met it, not alone, St. Benedict being with him 
now, when he had no longer the strength of man to 
trust in. 

The Normans, as they approached him, threw them- 
selves on their knees, — covered themselves with dust, 
and implored his pardon and his blessing. 



Alfred to Cccur de Lion. 85 

There's a bit of poetry — if you like, — but a piece 
of steel-clad fact also, compared to which the battle 
of Hastings and Waterloo both, were mere boys' 
squabbles. 

You don't suppose, you British schoolboys, that yo?i 
overthrew Napoleon — you? Your prime Minister 
folded up the map of Europe at the thought of him. 
Not you, but the snows of Heaven, and the hand of 
Him who dasheth in pieces with a rod of iron. He 
casteth forth His ice like morsels, — who can stand 
before His cold ? 

But, so far as you have indeed the right to trust in 
the courage of your own hearts, remember also — it is 
not in Norman nor Saxon, but in Celtic race that your 
real strength lies. The battles both of Waterloo and 
Alma were won by Irish and Scots — by the terrible 
Scots Greys, and by Sir Colin's Highlanders. Your 
'thin red line,' was kept steady at Alma only by 
Colonel Yea's swearing at them. 

But the old Pope, alone against a Norman army, 
wanted nobody to swear at him. Steady enough he, 
having somebody to bless him, instead of swear at him. 
St. Benedict, namely ; whose (memory shall we say ?) 
helped him now at his pinch in a singular manner, — 
for the Normans, having got the old man's forgiveness, 
vowed themselves his feudal servants ; and for seven 
centuries afterwards the whole kingdom of Naples re- 
mained a fief of St. Peter, — won for him thus by a 



&6 The Pleasures of 

single man, unarmed, against three thousand Norman 
knights, captained by Robert Guiscard ! 

A day of deeds, gentlemen, to some purpose, — that 
1 8th of June, anyhow. 

Here, in the historical account of Norman character, 
I must unwillingly stop for to-day — because, as you 
choose to spend your University money in building 
ball-rooms instead of lecture-rooms, I dare not keep 
you much longer in this black hole, with its nineteenth 
century ventilation. I try your patience — and tax 
your breath — only for a few minutes more in drawing 
the necessary corollaries respecting Norman art.* 

How far the existing British nation owes its military 
prowess to the blood of Normandy and Anjou, I have 
never examined its genealogy enough to tell you ; — 
but this I can tell you positively, that whatever consti- 
tutional order or personal valour the Normans enforced 
or taught among the nations they conquered, they did 
not at first attempt with their own hands to rival them 
in any of their finer arts, but used both Greek and 
Saxon sculptors, either as slaves, or hired workmen, 
and more or less therefore chilled and degraded the 
hearts of the men thus set to servile, or at best, hire- 
ling, labour. 

* Given at much greater length in the lecture, with diagrams from Iffley 
and Poictiers, without which the text of them would be unintelligible. The 
sum of what I said was a strong assertion of the incapacity of the Nor- 
mans for any but the rudest and most grotesque sculpture, — Poictiers being, on 
the contrary, examined and praised as Gallic-French — not Norman. 



Alfred to Occur dc Lion. 87 

In 1874, I went to see Etna, Scylla, Charybdis, and 
the tombs of the Norman Kings at Palermo ; surprised, 
as you may imagine, to find that there wasn't a stroke 
nor a notion of Norman work in them. They are, 
every atom, done by Greeks, and are as pure Greek as 
the temple of yEgina ; but more rich and refined. I 
drew with accurate care, and with measured profile of 
every moulding, the tomb built for Roger II. (after- 
wards Frederick II. was laid in its dark porphyry). 
And it is a perfect type of the Greek-Christian form 
of tomb — temple over sarcophagus, in which the ped- 
iments rise gradually, as time goes on, into acute 
angles — get pierced in the gable with foils, and their 
sculptures thrown outside on their flanks, and become 
at last in the fourteenth century, the tombs of Verona. 
But what is the meaning of the Normans employing 
these Greek slaves for their work in Sicily (within 
thirty miles of the field of Himera) ? Well, the main 
meaning is that though the Normans could build, they 
couldn't carve, and were wise enough not to try to, 
when they couldn't, as you do now all over this in- 
tensely comic and tragic town : but, here in England, 
they only employed the Saxon with a grudge, and 
therefore being more and more driven to use barren 
mouldings without sculpture, gradually developed the 
structural forms of archivolt, which breaking into the 
lancet, brighten and balance themselves into the sym- 
metry of early English Gothic. 



88 x The Pleasures of Deed. 

But even for the first decoration of the archivolt 
itself, they were probably indebted to the Greeks in 
a degree I never apprehended, until by pure happy 
chance, a friend gave me the clue to it just as I was 
writing the last pages of this lecture. 

In the generalization of ornament attempted in the 
first volume of the ' Stones of Venice,' I supposed the 
Norman zigzag (and with some practical truth) to be 
derived from the angular notches with which the blow 
of an axe can most easily decorate, or at least vary, 
the solid edge of a square fillet. My good friend, and 
supporter, and for some time back the single trustee 
of St. George's Guild, Mr. George Baker, having come 
to Oxford on Guild business, I happened to show him 
the photographs of the front of Iffley church, which 
had been collected for this lecture ; and immediately 
afterwards, in taking him through the schools, stopped 
to show him the Athena of yEgina as one of the most 
important of the Greek examples lately obtained for us 
by Professor Richmond. The statue is (rightly) so 
placed that in looking up to it, the plait of hair across 
the forehead is seen in a steeply curved arch. "Why," 
says Mr. Baker, pointing to it, " there's the Norman 
arch of Iffley." Sure enough, there It exactly was : 
and a moment's reflection showed me how easily, and 
with what instinctive fitness, the Norman builders, 
looking to the Greeks as their absolute masters in 
sculpture, and recognizing also, during the Crusades, 



Alfred to Cccur de Lion. 89 

the hieroglyphic use of the zigzag, for water, by the 
Egyptians, might have adopted this easily attained 
decoration at once as the sign of the element over 
which they reigned, and of the power of the Greek 
goddess who ruled both it and them. 

I do not in the least press your acceptance of such 
a tradition, nor for the rest, do I care myself whence 
any method of ornament is derived, if only, as a stran- 
ger, you bid it reverent welcome. But much proba- 
bility is added to the conjecture by the indisputable 
transition of the Greek egg and arrow moulding into 
the floral cornices of Saxon and other twelfth century 
cathedrals in Central France. These and other such 
transitions and exaltations I will give you the materials 
to study at your leisure, after illustrating in my next 
lecture the forces of religious imagination by which all 
that was most beautiful in them was inspired. 



LECTURE IV. 

{Nov. 8, 1884.) 



THE PLEASURES OF FANCY. 

Costir de Lion to Elizabeth 

(1189 to 1558). 



LECTURE IV. 
THE PLEASURES OF FANCY. 



CCEUR DE LION TO ELIZABETH. 

IN using the word " Fancy," for the mental faculties 
of which I am to speak to-day, I trust you, at your 
leisure, to read the Introductory Note to the second 
volume of ' Modern Painters' in the small new edition, 
which gives sufficient reason for practically including 
under the single term Fancy, or Fantasy, all the ener- 
gies of the Imagination, — in the terms of the last sen- 
tence of that preface, — " the healthy, voluntary, and 
necessary,* action of the highest powers of the human 
mind, on subjects properly demanding and justifying 
their exertion." 

I must farther ask you to read, in the same volume, 
the close of the chapter ' Of Imagination Penetrative,' 
pp. 1 20 to 130, of which the gist, which I must give as 
the first principle from which we start in our to-day's 
inquiry, is that " Imagination, rightly so called, has no 

* Meaning that all healthy minds possess imagination, and use it at will, under 
fixed laws of truthful perception and memory. 



94 The Pleasures of Fancy. 

food, no delight, no care, no perception, except of 
truth ; it is for ever looking under masks, and burning 
up mists ; no fairness of form, no majesty of seeming, 
will satisfy it ; the first condition of its existence is 
incapability of being deceived."* In that sentence, 
which is a part, and a very valuable part, of the origi- 
nal book, I still adopted and used unnecessarily the 
ordinary distinction between Fancy and Imagination — 
Fancy concerned with lighter things, creating fairies or 
centaurs, and Imagination creating men ; and I was in 
the habit always of implying by the meaner word 
Fancy, a voluntary Fallacy, as Wordsworth does in 
those lines to his wife, making of her a mere lay figure 
for the drapery of his fancy — 

Such if thou wert, in all men's view 
An universal show, 

What would my Fancy have to do, 
My feelings to bestow. 

But you will at once understand the higher and more 
universal power which I now wish you to understand 
by the Fancy, including all imaginative energy, correct- 
ing these lines of Wordsworth's to a more worthy 
description of a true lover's happiness. When a boy 
falls in love with a girl, you say he has taken a fancy 
for her; but if he love her rightly, that is to say for 
her noble qualities, you ought to say he has taken an 
imagination for her; for then he is endued with the 

* Vide pp. 124-5. 



Cceur de Lion to Elizabeth. 95 

new light of love which sees and tells of the mind in 
her, — and this neither falsely nor vainly. His love 
does not bestow, it discovers, what is indeed most 
precious in his mistress, and most needful for his own 
life and happiness. Day by day, as he loves her bet- 
ter, he discerns her more truly ; and it is only the truth 
of his love that does so. Falsehood to her, would at 
once disenchant and blind him. 

In my first lecture of this year, I pointed out to you 
with what extreme simplicity and reality the Chris- 
tian faith must have presented itself to the Northern 
Pagan's mind, in its distinction from his former con- 
fused and monstrous mythology. It was also in that 
simplicity and tangible reality of conception, that this 
Faith became to them, and to the other savage nations 
of Europe, Tutress of the real power of their imagina- 
tion ; and it became so, only in so far as it indeed con- 
veyed to them statements which, however in some re- 
spects mysterious, were yet most literally and brightly 
true, as compared with their former conceptions. So 
that while the blind cunning of the savage had pro- 
duced only misshapen logs or scrawls ; the seeing imagi- 
nation of the Christian painters created, for them and 
for all the world, the perfect types of the Virgin and 
of her Son ; which became, indeed, Divine, by being, 
with the most affectionate truth, human. 

And the association of this truth in loving concep- 
tion, with the general honesty and truth of the charac- 



96 The Pleasures of Fancy. 

ter, is again conclusively shown in the feelings of the 
lover to his mistress ; which we recognize as first reach- 
ing their height in the days of chivalry. The truth 
and faith of the lover, and his piety to Heaven, are 
the foundation, in his character, of all the joy in imagi- 
nation which he can receive from the conception of 
his lady's — now no more mortal — beauty. She is in- 
deed transfigured before him ; but the truth of the 
transfiguration is greater than that of the lightless 
aspect she bears to others. When therefore, in my 
next lecture, I speak of the Pleasures of Truth, as 
distinct from those of the Imagination, — if either the 
limits or clearness of brief title had permitted me, I 
should have said, untrans figured truth ; — meaning on 
the one side, truth which we have not heart enough to 
transfigure, and on the other, truth of the lower kind 
which is incapable of transfiguration. One may look 
at a girl till one believes she is an angel ; because, in 
the best of her, she is one ; but one can't look at a 
cockchafer till one believes it is a girl. 

With this warning of the connection which exists 
between the honest intellect and the healthy imagi- 
nation ; and using henceforward the shorter word 
' Fancy ' for all' inventive vision, I proceed to consider 
with you the meaning and consequences of the frank 
and eager exertion of the fancy on Religious subjects, 
between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. 

Its first, and admittedly most questionable action, 



Coeur de Lion to Elizabeth. 97 

the promotion of the group of martyr saints of the 
third century to thrones of uncontested dominion in 
heaven, had better be distinctly understood, before we 
debate of it, either with the Iconoclast or the Ration- 
alist. This apotheosis by the Imagination is the sub- 
ject of my present lecture. To-day I only describe it, 
— in my next lecture I will discuss it. 

Observe, however, that in giving such a history of 
the mental constitution of nascent Christianity, we 
have to deal with, and carefully to distinguish, two 
entirely different orders in its accepted hierarchy : — 
one, scarcely founded at all on personal characters or 
acts, but mythic or symbolic ; often merely the revi- 
val, the baptized resuscitation of a Pagan deity, or the 
personified omnipresence of a Christian virtue ; — the 
other, a senate of Patres Conscripti of real persons, 
great in genius, and perfect, humanly speaking, in holi- 
ness ; who by their personal force and inspired wis- 
dom, wrought the plastic body of the Church into such 
noble form as in each of their epochs it was able to 
receive ; and on the right understanding of whose 
lives, nor less of the affectionate traditions which mag- 
nified and illumined their memories, must absolutely 
depend the value of every estimate we form, whether 
of the nature of the Christian Church herself, or of the 
directness of spiritual agency by which she was guided.* 

* If the reader believes in no spiritual agency, still his understanding of the 
first letters in the Alphabet of History depends on his comprehending rightly 
the tempers of the people who did. 



98 The Pleasures of Fancy. 

An important distinction, therefore, is to be noted 
at the outset, in the objects of this Apotheosis, accord- 
ing as they are, or are not, real persons. 

Of these two great orders of Saints, the first, or 
mythic, belongs — speaking broadly — to the southern or 
Greek Church alone. 

The Gothic Christians, once detached from the wor- 
ship of Odin and Thor, abjure from their hearts all 
trust in the elements, and all worship of ideas. They 
will have their Saints in flesh and blood, their Angels 
in plume and armour ; and nothing incorporeal or 
invisible. In all the Religious sculpture beside Loire 
and Seine, you will not find either of the great rivers 
personified ; the dress of the highest seraph is of true 
steel or sound broadcloth, neither flecked by hail, nor 
fringed by thunder ; and while the ideal Charity of 
Giotto at Padua presents her heart in her hand to God, 
and tramples at the same instant on bags of gold, the 
treasures of the world, and gives only corn and flow- 
ers ; that on the west porch of Amiens is content to 
clothe a beggar with a piece of the staple manufacture 
of the town. 

On the contrary, it is nearly impossible to find in the 
imagery of the Greek Church, under the former exer- 
cise of the Imagination, a representation either of man 
or beast ^vhich purports to represent only the person, 
or the brute. Every mortal creature stands for an Im- 
mortal Intelligence or Influence : a Lamb means an 



Cceur de Lion to Elizabeth. 99 

Apostle, a Lion an Evangelist, an Angel the Eternal 
justice or benevolence; and the most historical and 
indubitable of Saints are compelled to set forth, in 
their vulgarly apparent persons, a Platonic myth or an 
Athanasian article. 

I therefore take note first of the mythic saints in 
succession, whom this treatment of them by the 
Byzantine Church made afterwards the favourite idols 
of all Christendom. 

I. The most mythic is of course St. Sophia ; the 
shade of the Greek Athena, passing into the ' Wisdom ' 
of the Jewish Proverbs and Psalms, and the Apocry- 
phal ' Wisdom of Solomon.' She always remains 
understood as a personification only ; and has no direct 
influence on the mind of the unlearned multitude of 
Western Christendom, except as a godmother, — in 
which kindly function she is more and more accepted 
as times go on ; her healthy influence being perhaps 
greater over sweet vicars' daughters in Wakefield — 
when Wakefield was, — than over the prudentest of the 
rarely prudent Empresses of Byzantium. 

II. Of St. Catharine of Egypt there are vestiges of 
personal tradition which may perhaps permit the sup- 
position of her having really once existed, as a very 
lovely, witty, proud, and ' fanciful ' girl. She after- 
wards becomes the Christian type of the Bride, in the 
' Song of Solomon,' involved with an ideal of all that is 



ioo The Pleasures of Fancy. 

purest in the life of a nun, and brightest in the death 
of a martyr. It is scarcely possible to overrate the in- 
fluence of the conceptions formed of her, in ennobling 
the sentiments of Christian women of the higher 
orders ; — to their practical common sense, as the mis- 
tresses of a household or a nation, her example may 
have been less conducive. 

III. St. Barbara, also an Egyptian, and St. Catha- 
rine's contemporary, though the most practical of the 
mythic saints, is also, after St. Sophia, the least cor- 
poreal : she vanishes far away into the ' Inclusa Danae,' 
and her " Turris aenea" becomes a myth of Christian 
safety, of which the Scriptural significance may be 
enough felt by merely looking out the texts under the 
word "Tower," in your concordance; and whose effect- 
ual power, in the fortitudes alike of matter and spirit, 
was in all probability made impressive enough to all 
Christendom, both by the fortifications and persecu- 
tions of Diocletian. I have endeavoured to mark her 
general relations to St. Sophia in the little imaginary 
dialogue between them, given in the eighth lecture of 
the ' Ethics of the Dust.' 

Afterwards, as Gothic architecture becomes dom- 
inant, and at last beyond question the most wonder- 
ful of all temple-building, St. Barbara's Tower is, of 
course, its perfected symbol and utmost achievement ; 
and whether in the coronets of countless battlements 
worn on the brows of the noblest cities, or in the Lorn- 



Coeur de Lion to Elizabeth. 101 

bard bell-tower on the mountains, and the English 
spire on Sarum plain, the geometric majesty of the 
Egyptian maid became glorious in harmony of 
defence, and sacred with precision of symbol. 

As the buildings which showed her utmost skill were 
chiefly exposed to lightning, she is invoked in defence 
from it ; and our petition in the Litany, against sudden 
death, was written originally to her. The blasphemous 
corruptions of her into a patroness of cannon and gun- 
powder, are among the most ludicrous, (because precisely 
contrary to the original tradition,) as well as the most 
deadly, insolences and stupidities of Renaissance Art. 

IV. St. Margaret of Antioch was a shepherdess; 
the St. Genevieve of the East ; the type of feminine 
gentleness and simplicity. Traditions of the resur- 
rection of Alcestis perhaps mingle in those of her 
contest with the dragon ; but at all events, she differs 
from the other three great mythic saints, in express- 
ing the soul's victory over temptation or affliction, 
by Christ's miraculous help, and without any special 
power of its own. She is the saint of the meek and 
of the poor ; her virtue and her victory are those of 
all gracious and lowly womanhood ; and her memory 
is consecrated among the gentle households of Europe; 
no other name, except those of Jeanne and Jcanic, 
seems so gifted with a baptismal fairy power of giving 
grace and peace. 

I must be forgiven for thinking, even on this canon- 



102 The Pleasures of Fancy, 

ical ground, not only of Jeanie Deans, and Margaret 
of Branksome ; but of Meg — Merrilies. My readers 
will, I fear, choose rather to think of the more doubt- 
ful victory over the Dragon, won by the great Marga- 
ret of German literature. 

V. With much more clearness and historic comfort 
we may approach the shrine of St. Cecilia ; and even 
on the most prosaic and realistic minds — such as my 
own — a visit to her house in Rome has a comforting 
and establishing effect, which reminds one of the 
carter in ' Harry and Lucy,' who is convinced of the 
truth of a plaustral catastrophe at first incredible to 
him, as soon as he hears the name of the hill on which 
it happened. The ruling conception of her is deep- 
ened gradually by the enlarged study of Religious 
music ; and is at its best and highest in the thir- 
teenth century, when she rather resists than complies 
with the already tempting and distracting powers of 
sound; and we are told that " cantantibus organis, 
Cecilia virgo in corde suo soli Domino decantabat, 
dicens, ' Fiat, Domine, cor meum et corpus meum 
immaculatum, ut non confundar.' " 

(" While the instruments played, Cecilia the virgin 
sang in her heart only to the Lord, saying, Oh Lord, 
be my heart and body made stainless, that I be not 
confounded.") 

This sentence occurs in my great Service-book of 
the convent of Beau-pre, written in 1290, and it is 



Cosur de Lion to Elizabeth. 103 

illustrated with a miniature of Cecilia sitting silent at 
a banquet, where all manner of musicians are playing. 
I need not point out to you how the law, not of 
sacred music only, so called, but of all music, is deter- 
mined by this sentence ; which means in effect that 
unless music exalt and purify, it is not under St. Ce- 
cilia's ordinance, and it is not, virtually, music at all. 
Her confessed power at last expires amidst a hub- 
bub of odes and sonatas; and I suppose her presence 
at a Morning Popular is as little anticipated as desired. 
Unconfessed, she is of all the mythic saints for ever 
the greatest; and the child in its nurse's arms, and 
every tender and gentle spirit which resolves to purify 
in itself, — as the eye for seeing, so the ear for hearing, 
— may still, whether behind the Temple veil,* or at 
the fireside, and by the wayside, hear Cecilia sing. 

* " But, standing in the lowest place, 

And mingled with the work-day crowd, 
A poor man looks, with lifted face, 
And hears the Angels cry aloud. 

" He seeks not how each instant flies, 
One moment is Eternity ; 
His spirit with the Angels cries 
To Thee, to Thee, continually. 

" What if, Isaiah-like, he know 
His heart be weak, his lips unclean, 
His nature vile, his office low, 
His dwelling and his people mean ? 

" To such the Angels spake of old— 
To such of yore, the glory came ; 
These altar fires can ne'er grow cold : 
Then be it his, that cleansing flame." 

These verses, part of a very lovely poem, " To Thee all Angels cry aloud," 



104 The Pleasures of Fancy. 

It would delay me too long just now to trace in 
specialty farther the functions of the mythic, or, as in 
another sense they may be truly called, the universal, 
Saints : the next greatest of them, St. Ursula, is essen- 
tially British, — and you will find enough about her in 
' Fors Clavigera ' ; the others, I will simply give you in 
entirely authoritative order from the St. Louis' Psalter, 
as he read and thought of them. 

The proper Service-book of the thirteenth century 
consists first of the pure Psalter ; then of certain essen- 
tial passages of the Old Testament — invariably the 
Song of Miriam at the Red Sea and the last song of 
Moses; — ordinarily also the 12th of Isaiah and the 
prayer of Habakkuk ; while St. Louis' Psalter has also 
the prayer of Hannah, and that of Hezekiah (Isaiah 
xxxviii. io — 20) ; the Song of the Three Children ; the 
the Benedictus, the Magnificat, and the Nunc Dimittis. 
Then follows the Athanasian Creed ; and then, as in 
all Psalters after their chosen Scripture passages, the 
collects to the Virgin, the Te Deum, and Service to 
Christ, beginning with the Psalm ' The Lord reigneth ' ; 
and then the collects to the greater individual saints, 
closing with the Litany, or constant prayer for mercy 
to Christ, and all saints ; of whom the order is, — Arch- 
angels, Patriarchs, Apostles, Disciples, Innocents, Mar- 
in the 'Monthly Packet' for September 1873, are only signed 'Veritas.' The 
volume for that year (the 16th) is well worth getting-, for the sake of the admira- 
ble papers in it by Miss Sewell, on questions of the day ; by Miss A. C Owen, 
on Christian Art ; and the unsigned Cameos from English History. 



Cosur de Lion to Elizabeth. 105 

tyrs, Confessors, Monks, and Virgins. Of women the 
Magdalen always leads ; St. Mary of Egypt usually 
follows, but may be the last. Then the order varies in 
every place, and prayer-book, no recognizable suprem- 
acy being traceable ; except in relation to the place, 
or person, for whom the book was written. In St. 
Louis', St. Genevieve (the last saint to whom he 
prayed on his death-bed) follows the two Maries ; then 
come — memorable for you best, as easiest, in this six- 
foil group, — Saints Catharine, Margaret, and Scolas- 
tica, Agatha, Cecilia, and Agnes ; and then ten more, 
whom you may learn or not as you like : I note them 
now only for future reference, — more lively and easy 
for your learning, — by their French names, 

Felicity, 

Colombe, 

Christine, 

Aur£e, Honorine, 

Radegonde, 

Praxede, 

Euph£mie, 

Bathilde, Eugenie. 

Such was the system of Theology into which the 
Imaginative Religion of Europe was crystallized, by 



106 The Pleasttres of Fancy. 

the growth of its own best faculties, and the influence 
of all accessible and credible authorities, during the 
period between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries 
inclusive. Its spiritual power is completely repre- 
sented by the angelic and apostolic dynasties, and the 
women-saints in Paradise ; for of the men-saints, be- 
neath the apostles and prophets, none but St. Christo- 
pher, St. Nicholas, St. Anthony, St. James, and St. 
George, attained anything like the influence of Catha- 
rine or Cecilia ; for the very curious reason, that the 
men-saints were much more true, real, and numerous. 
St. Martin was reverenced all over Europe, but defi- 
nitely, as a man, and the Bishop of Tours. So St. 
Ambrose at Milan, and St. Gregory at Rome, and hun- 
dreds of good men more, all over the world ; while the 
really good women remained, though not rare, incon- 
spicuous. The virtues of French Clotilde, and Swiss 
Berthe, were painfully borne down in the balance of 
visible judgment, by the guilt of the Gonerils, Regans, 
and Lady Macbeths, whose spectral procession closes 
only with the figure of Eleanor in Woodstock maze ; 
and in dearth of nearer objects, the daily brighter 
powers of fancy dwelt with more concentrated devo- 
tion on the stainless ideals of the earlier maid-martyrs. 
And observe, even the loftier fame of the men-saints 
above named, as compared with the rest, depends on 
precisely the same character of indefinite personality ; 
and on the representation, by each of them, of a moral 



Coeur de Lion to Elizabeth. 107 

idea which may be embodied and painted in a miracu- 
lous legend ; credible, as history, even then, only to the 
vulgar ; but powerful over them, nevertheless, exactly 
in proportion to the degree in which it can be pic- 
tured and fancied as a living creature. Consider even 
yet in these days of mechanism, how the dullest John 
Bull cannot with perfect complacency adore himself, 
except under the figure of Britannia or the British 
Lion ; and how the existence of the popular jest-book, 
which might have seemed secure in its necessity to 
our weekly recreation, is yet virtually centred on the 
imaginary animation of a puppet, and the imaginary 
elevation to reason of a dog. But in the Middle Ages, 
this action of the Fancy, now distorted and despised, 
was the happy and sacred tutress of every faculty of 
the body and soul ; and the works and thoughts 
of art, the joys and toils of men, rose and flowed on 
in the bright air of it, with the aspiration of a flame, 
and the beneficence of a fountain. 

And now, in the rest of my lecture, I had intended 
to give you a broad summary of the rise and fall of 
English art, born under this code of theology, and this 
enthusiasm of duty; — of its rise, from the rude vaults 
of Westminster, to the finished majesty of Wells ; — 
and of its fall, from that brief hour of the thirteenth 
century, through the wars of the Bolingbroke, and the 
pride of the Tudor, and the lust of the Stewart, to 
expire under the mocking snarl and ruthless blow of 



1 08 The Pleasures of Fancy. 

the Puritan. But you know that I have always, in 
my most serious work, allowed myself to be influenced 
by those Chances, as they are now called, — but to my 
own feeling and belief, guidances, and even, if rightly 
understood, commands, — which, as far as I have read 
history, the best and sincerest men think providen- 
tial. Had this lecture been on common principles of 
art, I should have finished it as I intended, without 
fear of its being the worse for my consistency. But it 
deals, on the contrary, with a subject, respecting 
which every sentence I write, or speak, is of impor- 
tance in its issue ; and I allowed, as you heard, the 
momentary observation of a friend, to give an 
entirely new cast to the close of my last lecture. 
Much more, I feel it incumbent upon me in this 
one, to take advantage of the most opportune help, 
though in an unexpected direction, given me by my 
constant tutor, Professor Westwood. I went to dine 
with him, a day or two ago, mainly — being neither of 
us, I am thankful to say, blue-ribanded — to drink his 
health on his recovery from his recent accident. 
Whereupon he gave me a feast of good talk, old 
wine, and purple manuscripts. And having had as 
much of all as I could well carry, just as it came 
to the good-night, out he brings, for a finish, this 
leaf of manuscript in my hand, which he has lent 
me to show you, — a leaf of the Bible of Charles the 
Bald! 



Cceur de Lion to Elizabeth. 109 

A leaf of it, at least, as far as you or I could tell, 
for Professor Westwood's copy is just as good, in all 
the parts finished, as the original : and, for all prac- 
tical purpose, I show you here in my hand a leaf of 
the Bible which your own King Alfred saw with his 
own bright eyes, and from which he learned his child- 
faith in the days of dawning thought! 

There are few English children who do not know 
the story of Alfred, the king, letting the cakes burn, 
and being chidden by his peasant hostess. How few 
English children — nay, how few perhaps of their 
educated, not to say learned, elders — reflect upon, if 
even they know, the far different scenes through which 
he had passed when a child ! 

Concerning his father, his mother, and his own 
childhood, suppose you were to teach your children 
first these following main facts, before you come to 
the toasting of the muffin? 

His father, educated by Helmstan, Bishop of Win- 
chester, had been offered the throne of the great 
Saxon kingdom of Mercia in his early youth; had 
refused it, and entered, as a novice under St. Swithin 
the monastery at Winchester. From St. Swithin, he 
received the monastic habit, and was appointed by 
Bishop Helmstan one of his sub-deacons ! 

"The quiet seclusion which Ethelwulph's slow* 

* Turner, quoting William of Malmesbury, " Crassioris et hcbetis ingcnii," — 
meaning that he had neither ardour for war, nor ambition for kinghood. 



no The Pleasures of Fancy. 

capacity and meek temper coveted " was not permitted 
to him by fate. The death of his elder brother left 
him the only living representative of the line of the 
West Saxon princes. His accession to the throne 
became the desire of the people. He obtained a dis- 
pensation from the Pope to leave the cloister ; 
assumed the crown of Egbert ; and retained Egbert's 
prime minister, Alstan, Bishop of Sherborne, who was 
the Minister in peace and war, the Treasurer, and the 
Counsellor, of the kings of England, over a space, from 
first to last, of fifty years. 

Alfred's mother, Osburga, must have been married 
for love. She was the daughter of Oslac, the king's 
cup-bearer. Extolled for her piety and understand- 
ing, she bore the king four sons ; dying before the 
last, Alfred, was five years old, but leaving him St. 
Swithin for his tutor. How little do any of us think, 
in idle talk of rain or no rain on St. Swithin's day, that 
we speak of the man whom Alfred's father obeyed 
as a monk, and whom his mother chose for his 
guardian ! 

Alfred, both to father and mother, was the best 
beloved of their children. On his mother's death, his 
father sent him, being then five years old, with a great 
retinue through France and across the Alps to Rome ; 
and there the Pope anointed him King, (heir-appar- 
ent to the English throne), at the request of his 
father. 



Cceur de Lion to Elizabeth. 1 1 1 

Think of it, you travellers through the Alps by 
tunnels, that you may go to balls at Rome or hells at 
Monaco. Here is another manner of journey, another 
goal for it, appointed for your little king. At twelve, 
he was already the best hunter among the Saxon 
youths. Be sure he could sit his horse at five. Fancy 
the child, with his keen genius, and holy heart, riding 
with his Saxon chiefs beside him, by the Alpine flow- 
ers under Velan or Sempione, and down among the 
olives to Pavia, to Perugia, to Rome ; there, like the 
little fabled Virgin, ascending the Temple steps, and 
consecrated to be King of England by the great Leo, 
Leo of the Leonine city, the saviour of Rome from 
the Saracen. 

Two years afterwards, he rode again to Rome 
beside his father ; the West Saxon king bringing 
presents to the Pope, a crown of pure gold weighing 
four pounds, a sword adorned with pure gold, two 
golden images,* four Saxon silver dishes ; and giving 
a gift of gold to all the Roman clergy and nobles,f 
and of silver to the people. 

No idle sacrifices or symbols, these gifts of cour- 

* Turner, Book IV.,— not a vestige of hint from the stupid Englishman, what 
the Pope wanted with crown, sword, or image ! My own guess would be, that 
it meant an offering of the entire household strength, in war and peace, of the 
Saxon nation,— their crown, their sword, their household gods, Irminsul and 
Irminsula, their feasting, and their robes. 

t Again, what does this mean ? Gifts of honour to the Pope's immediate 
attendants— silver to all Rome? Docs the modern reader think this is buying 
little Alfred's consecration too dear, or that Leo is selling the Holy Ghost ? 



1 1 2 The Pleasures of Fancy. 

tesy! The Saxon King rebuilt on the highest hill 
that is bathed by Tiber, the Saxon street and school, 
the Borgo,* of whose miraculously arrested burning 
Raphael's fresco preserves the story to this day. And 
further he obtained from Leo the liberty of all Saxon 
men from bonds in penance ; — a first phase this of 
Magna Charta, obtained more honourably, from a 
more honourable person, than that document, by 
which Englishmen of this day, suppose they live, 
move, and have being. 

How far into Alfred's soul, at seven years old, sank 
any true image of what Rome was, and had been ; 
of what her Lion Lord was, who had saved her from 
the Saracen, and her Lion Lord had been, who had 
saved her from the Hun ; and what this Spiritual 
Dominion was, and was to be, which could make and 
unmake kings, and save nations, and put armies to 
flight ; I leave those to say, who have learned to rever- 
ence childhood. This, at least, is sure, that the days 
of Alfred were bound each to each, not only by their 
natural piety, but by the actual presence and appeal 
to his heart, of all that was then in the world most 
noble, beautiful, and strong against Death. 

In this living Book of God he had learned to read, 

*"Quse in eorum lingua Burgus dicitur,— the place where it was situated 
was called the Saxon street, Saxonum vicum " (Anastasius, quoted by Turner). 
There seems to me some evidence in the scattered passages I have not time 
to collate, that at this time the Saxoc Burg, or tower, of a village, included the 
idea of its school. 



Cceur de Lion to Elizabeth. 113 

thus early; and with perhaps nobler ambition than 
of getting the prize of a gilded psalm-book at his 
mother's knee, as you are commonly told of him. 
What sort of psalm-book it was, however, you may 
see from this leaf in my hand. For, as his father 
and he returned from Rome that year, they stayed 
again at the Court of Charlemagne's grandson, whose 
daughter, the Princess Judith, Ethelwolf was wooing 
for Queen of England, (not queen-consort, merely, but 
crowned queen, of authority equal to his own.) From 
whom Alfred was like enough to have had a reading 
lesson or two out of her father's Bible ; and like 
enough, the little prince, to have stayed her hand at 
this bright leaf of it, the Lion-leaf, bearing the symbol 
of the Lion of the tribe of Judah. 

You cannot, of course, see anything but the glit- 
tering from where you sit ; nor even if you afterwards 
look at it near, will you find a figure the least admi- 
rable or impressive to you. It is not like Landseer's 
Lions in Trafalgar Square ; nor like Tenniel's in 
1 Punch ' ; still less like the real ones in Regent's 
Park. Neither do I show it you as admirable in any 
respect of art, other than that of skilfullest illumina- 
tion. I show it you, as the most interesting Gothic 
type of the imagination of Lion ; which, after the 
Roman Eagle, possessed the minds of all European 
warriors; until, as they themselves grew selfish and 
cruel, the symbols which at first meant heaven-sent 



114 The Pleasures of Fancy. 

victory, or the strength and presence of some Divine 
spirit, became to them only the signs of their own 
pride or rage : the victor raven of Corvus sinks into 
the shamed falcon of Marmion, and the lion-hearted- 
ness which gave the glory and the peace of the gods 
to Leonidas, casts the glory and the might of king- 
hood to the dust before Chalus.* 

That death, 6th April, 1199, ended the advance of 
England begun by Alfred, under the pure law of Re- 
ligious Imagination. She began, already, in the thir- 
teenth century, to be decoratively, instead of vitally, 
religious. The history of the Religious Imagination 
expressed between Alfred's time and that of Cceur de 
Lion, in this symbol of the Lion only, has material in 
it rather for all my seven lectures than for the clos- 
ing section of one ; but I must briefly specify to you 
the main sections of it. I will keep clear of my fa- 
vourite number seven, and ask you to recollect the 
meaning of only Five, Mythic Lions. 

First of all, in Greek art, remember to keep your- 
selves clear about the difference between the Lion 
and the Gorgon. 

The Gorgon is the power of evil in heaven, con- 
quered by Athena, and thenceforward becoming her 
aegis, when she is herself the inflictor of evil. Her 
helmet is then the helmet of Orcus. 

* ' Fors Clavigera, March, 1871, p. 19. Yet read the preceding pages, and 
learn the truth of the lion heart, while you mourn its pride. Note especially 
his absolute law against usury. 



Cceur dc Lion to Elizabeth. 115 

But the Lion is the power of death on earth, con- 
quered by Heracles, and becoming thenceforward both 
his helmet and aegis. All ordinary architectural lion 
sculpture is derived from the Heraclean. 

Then the Christian Lions are, first, the Lion of the 
Tribe of Judah — Christ Himself as Captain and Judge: 
" He shall rule the nations with a rod of iron," (the 
opposite power of His adversary, is rarely intended 
in sculpture unless in association with the serpent 
— " inculcabis supra leonem et aspidem"); secondly, 
the Lion of St. Mark, the power of the Gospel going 
out to conquest ; thirdly, the Lion of St. Jerome, the 
wrath of the brute creation changed into love by the 
kindness of man ; and, fourthly, the Lion of the Zo- 
diac, which is the Lion of Egypt and of the Lombardic 
pillar-supports in Italy ; these four, if you remember, 
with the Nemean Greek one, five altogether, will give 
you, broadly, interpretation of nearly all Lion symbol- 
ism in great art. How they degenerate into the 
British door knocker, I leave you to determine for 
yourselves, with such assistances as I may be able to 
suggest to you in my next lecture; but, as the gn> 
tesqueness of human history plans it, there is actually 
a connection between that last degradation of the 
Leonine symbol, and its first and noblest signifi- 
cance. 

You see there are letters round this golden Lion 
of Alfred's spelling-book, which his princess friend was 



1 1 6 The Pleastires of Fancy. 

likely enough to spell for him. They are two Latin 

hexameters : — 

Hie Leo, surgendo, portas confregit Averni 
Qui nunquam dormit, nusquam dormitat, in aevum. 
(This Lion, rising, burst the gates of Death : 
This, who sleeps not, nor shall sleep, for ever.) 

Now here is the Christian change of the Heraclean 
conquest of Death into Christ's Resurrection. Sam- 
son's bearing away the gates of Gaza is another like 
symbol, and to the mind of Alfred, taught, whether 
by the Pope Leo for his schoolmaster, or by the great- 
granddaughter of Charlemagne for his schoolmistress, 
it represented, as it did to all the intelligence of 
Christendom, Christ in His own first and last, Alpha 
and Omega, description of Himself, — 

" I am He that liveth and was dead, and behold I 
am alive for evermore, and have the keys of Hell and 
of Death." And in His servant St. John's description 
of Him — 

" Who is the Faithful Witness and the First-begotten 
of the dead, and the Prince of the kings of the earth." 

All this assuredly, so far as the young child, conse- 
crated like David, the youngest of his brethren, con- 
ceived his own new life in Earth and Heaven, — he 
understood already in the Lion symbol. But of all 
this I had no thought* when I chose the prayer of 

* The reference to the Bible of Charles le Chauve was added to my second 
lecture (page 54), in correcting the press, mistakenly put into the text instead 
of the notes. 



Cozur de Lioii to Elizabeth. 1 1 7 

Alfred as the type of the Religion of his era, in its 
dwelling, not on the deliverance from the punishment 
of sin, but from the poisonous sleep and death of it. 
Will you ever learn that prayer again, — youths who 
are to be priests, and knights, and kings of England, 
in these the latter days? when the gospel of Eternal 
Death is preached here in Oxford to you for the 
Pride of Truth ? and " the mountain of the Lord's 
House" has become a Golgotha, and the "new song 
before the throne " sunk into the rolling thunder of 
the death rattle of the Nations, crying, " O Christ, 
where is Thy Victory ! " 

NOTES. 

1. The Five Christmas Days. (These were drawn out on 
a large and conspicuous diagram.) 

These days, as it happens, sum up the History of their 
Five Centuries. 

Christmas Day, 496. Clovis baptized. 

" 800. Charlemange crowned. 

" 1041. Vow of the Count of 

A versa (Page 80). 
" 1066. The Conqueror crowned. 
" 1 130. Roger II. crowned King 
of the Two Sicilies. 

2. For conclusion of the whole matter two pictures were 
shown and commented on — the two most perfect pictures in 
the world. 



1 1 8 The Pleasures of Fancy. 

(i) A small piece from Tintoret's Paradiso in the Ducal 
Palace, representing the group of St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, 
St. Gregory, St. Augustine, and behind St. Augustine his 
mother watching him, her chief joy even in Paradise. 

(2) The Arundel Society's reproduction of the Altar- 
piece by Giorgione in his native hamlet of Castel Franco. 
The Arundel Society has done more for us than we have 
any notion of. 



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